Google Ad Planner: A New Tool for Internet Media Planners

Author: April Hall
Internet Copywriter

For internet media planners, much of the difficulty revolves around deciding which sites to target, how to find your ideal audience and reduce the number of missed opportunities. Many media planners eventually decide to reach out to a relatively few number of larger, well-known sites, deciding that it is best to aim for the known rather than to spend countless hours and unnecessary budget finances on online ad buys that may or may not hit their target customers.

Fortunately, the gurus at Google have developed a way to assist media planners as they organize their ad buys. Yesterday, Google introduced a new tool known as the Google Ad Planner. Like many of the tools offered by Google, Ad Planner understands that many users are like me–not overly technically-savvy, and intimidated by complicated applications. For this reason, this new media planning tool is surprisingly simple and completely intuitive. Of course, web design and internet marketing companies, which often have a talented media planner on staff, will also appreciate the capabilities of Ad Planner.

From the very first glance, users can recognize the value of using Google Ad Planner:

Media planners can easily find out invaluable information about sites that pertain to their industry:

• Which sites are the most popular for their target audience

• Smaller, less well-known sites that are popular with their customers

• How many countries each site reaches

• Page views

• Unique visitors information

• Demographic information of site visitors such as: gender, age, education and income
  

Aside from the vague disquiet I initially feel once I realize how much information that Google has about me at its disposal, and how willing they are to share that information (alas, a topic for another post), I am amazed at what a powerful media tool Ad Planner is going to be. Planners can now micro-target websites that reach the majority of their target audience, without wasting unnecessary time and resources.

Once you know which sites your business should target for online ad buys, you can efficiently transfer your media plans, and then export them to a .csv file for easy opening in spreadsheet applications. Or, if you prefer, you can export your plans to DoubeClick’s MediaVisor in order to manage all of your media planning, purchasing and other online campaign management activities.

While we all would love to begin using Google Ad Planner immediately, it is currently open to users by invitation only. Those of you who are interested in learning more about how it works, in particular the fascinating research aspects of the tool, will enjoy Arthur Freydin’s succinct walk-through, during which he points out that Ad Planner would be even better if it were integrated with Ad Words accounts.

Like most Google tools, this new facet of campaign management will continue to grow and develop as it makes its way out of the beta stage. Why not sign up to be a part of the group of media planners that helps to influence how it matures?