Using Google Ad Planner on Irish Data – useful or not?

Google’s Ad Planner is a handy little tool which can help you identify what websites to advertise on.

A research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

Comscore rival?

So is it a rival for Comscore or Omniture?, I’ve found that in some (not all) cases the data is quite similar, as the data covers not only AdSense websites – it can be used for research purposes.

Data comes from Google Search, Google Analytics, “opt-in external consumer panel data” and “other third-party market research.”, which could be: Search, Reader, Feedburner, Adwords, Adsense, Checkout, Desktop, Earth, iGoogle, Maps, Toolbar, Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Orkut and more, so not exactly fluffy stats.

Show me some figures

A quick overview shows 2.6m UV (Unique Visitors) in Ireland, last time I was research internet usage in Ireland (2007/08) it was around 2.1m – so this figure isn’t too far off and is a good indicator.
What’s interesting is the accuracy of some of the statistics, comparing it to both my Comscore and Omniture data, it matched up quite well, although the figure of UV’s for Boards.ie in Ad Planner is 240k (based on 30days) while that figure has got to be much higher – as noted in ABC audit figure of 1.7m.

Refining your research allows you to drill down by County (not great for non cities) as well as language.

Targeting that Polish Cork sweetspot

Here’s a quick view if I wanted to target Polish visitors in Cork, this example quickly shows the level of targeting available with only two filters applied.

You can also define an audience, breaking it down by websites that your target audience visit, again zoning in on your target audience.

You can also break it down further based on websites visited and keywords searched for.

Ok, do something useful with this data

Once you’ve filtered down to the websites that match your criteria, you can export the list of websites for use in Google AdWords – and from there setup your placement ads to fit. For example – my chosen criteria allows me to target 78K UV’s across 8 websites.

Ireland get’s raw deal?

Yup, as the data size can run quite low when you apply a few filters, this message is quite common.

Meanwhile the level of targetting available in other countries also includes really useful (but probably not accurate) info like the below.

Missing out this key filter on demographics, makes a possibly really useful application – only somewhat useful. This additional set of information would put it in line with what’s available from other pay per click networks such as Facebook.

Summary

Ad Planner is essentially a tool to increase usage of the AdWords Content Network, and for the most part it is useful, especially as a research tool – and is good to quickly crunch some figures for websites – especially as it makes use of Google’s vast network of data.

More insights on Google Ad Planner

• Google Ad Planner review on SEOChat
• Competitive Intelligence Analytis by Avinash Kaushik
• Is Google Ad Planner Getting Its Data from Google Toolbar on TechCrunch
• Google Ad Planner v Comscore Data

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