Google announced the launch of a new application called “Ad Planner.” Ad Banner is a new research and planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit and develop more informed online advertising strategies.

Features:

• Define audiences by demographics– Gender, Age, Education, Annual Income,
• Search for websites relevant to your audience– This is an interesting feature that falls under the Behavior category. You can select a website and see statistics on traffic to that website and other websites that people visiting the selected website have also visited.
• Aggregated Statistics– Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Media Planning– Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.

How will you use it?

To get practical Google ad planner seems to be a perfect tool for researching potential advertising venues, creating a complete picture of the marketing reach of your planned online marketing program and researching competitors website statistics.

One of the most useful features is the Online Behavior tool. You pick a website that you know your customers visit (like your own website) and it will show you your site statistics along with other websites those visitors have also visited.  After you have specified the demographics of your target market you can check the Comp Index to determine which sites are the most targeted to your market. 

Comp index: Is a score showing how concentrated your audience is on a site relative to users in your defined country

The Bad

Currently you can’t search for websites by category. When creating an advertising strategy it would be nice to know that you have completely covered a category. Instead I found myself opening up a Google adwords account and creating a temporary site placement campaign. Google Adwords’ site placement tool allows you to browse by category. I would copy and Paste websites that I found in Google Adwords into the Google Ad Planner research tool to discover new opportunities. It would have been much easier if this would have been included in Google Ad Planner. I know this is an early beta release and I have sent feedback to Google about this missing feature.

Final Thoughts:

Google Ad Planner is a great tool for discovering new opportunities, researching competitive sites and planning targeted online marketing campaigns and this is only the first release! 

After I have had more time using the tool I will write updated reviews about specfic uses and features.
It’s currently available by invitation only. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can apply here.

As always, let me know what you think of my review and the Ad Planner tool.