You may recall earlier in the year, Google released Google Ad Planner on an invitation-basis only, not unlike the release of Gmail. Today, the company has announced that Google Ad Planner is available to everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LQrSiqw_ZsIf you are not familiar with Ad Planner, Google described it as:
…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.
Apart from making it available to everyone, Google has added some features to Ad Planner. Features include the abilities to:
– Define your audience by keywords and geography
– Manage your site results
– Analyze you media plan
– Get International demographic data
They have enhanced the geo-targeting capabilities, which should make for more relevant ad-serving. They’ve added three new site ranking methods so you can decide how you want your site results ranked and displayed. “You can choose between sites most likely to attract your target audience, larger known sites to increase your campaign scale, or a balance between the two,” says Google. “By applying other site filters, you can narrow your search to only sites that accept ads, sites in specific categories like ‘Video Games,’ or sites that end with a particular domain suffix like ‘.edu.'”
They’ve also added a new bubble chart, which helps you compare sites in your media plan based on demographics, frequency, traffic, and unique visitors. As far as demographic audience data, they’ve added a few countries like France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, and they plan to ad more in the future.
The new ad planner features should come in handy not only as the holidays roll around, but as businesses reallocate their marketing budgets and test different advertising strategies. They’re going to need all of the data they can get.
