Trying out Google Ad Planner
I decided to take a look at Google Ad Planner, Google’s new research tool designed for online media planners that seemingly relies on Google Analytics and the Google Toolbar for its site profile data.
The first thing I did after logging in to my new account was to create a “media plan.” Note that this “media plan,” which Google also refers to in their introductory post is not a real media plan because it doesn’t contain information such as flighting, costs, impressions or clicks, placements, ad sizes, creative type or targeting. It’s more like a Nielsen @plan pull (which I haven’t used in years) that shows sites with a high composition of your target audience along with the reach.
The “Research” tab is where most of the action happens. This page displays the functionality of finding sites that match your criteria. You can set the criteria either by demographics (gender, age, education and household income) or by online behavior (you specify a site and it tells you what other sites visitors to that site went to). For sites that match, it gives you the following stats: category, comp index, unique visitors, country reach and page views. It also shows whether you can advertise on the site with Google Adwords along with the specs (text or image, and image size).
I first tried researching by online behavior. I typed in the URL of a client of mine and five sites were spat back – two belonged to my client, one was a competitor’s site and the other two were on topic but have very small amount of traffic.
Next, I tried youbet.com, a horse race gambling site. This time, I got a good number of results. I could apply a filter to show only sites that are in Google’s content network. This means that if I wanted to run advertising for youbet.com, I’ve already found a few sites that are contextually relevant.
I could then go ahead and add these sites so that they appear in the Media Plan tab.
Next, I tried their Demographics research tool. A recent campaign I ran targeted women aged 20-29. They have 18-24 and 25-34 so I selected both of those. What I got back were a lot of parenting sites – nothing too unexpected.
All in all, I’d say that as a research tool, Google Ad Planner seems useful but I would like to see the research criteria get more robust. For those media planners who don’t rely very much on audience profile research, such as myself, the uses are pretty limited.