June 27 2008

Google ad planning tool

Google has launched a new free media planning tool to help businesses identify destination sites

The new Google Ad Planner – currently in invite-only beta - is a free media planning tool that can help identify websites your potential audience is likely to visit. The planner allows users to:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests
• Search for websites relevant to your audience
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries
• Create lists of websites where you'd like to advertise and store them in a media plan
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan

Google recently launched a similar service called 'Trends for websites', which allows users to measure websites' audiences using a combination of Google search data and other information that web users have opted to share about their behaviour.

With the new Ad Planner tool, Google said it will gather information about websites from a range of sources, including its own search engine but also via third parties and consumer panels.

The Google Ad Planner account interface consists of, an audience definition tool, where you define the audience by language, age, and other criteria and a list of sites matching a users criteria.

The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data to help make “informed decisions” about where a user might advertise and the Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)