Google Ad Planner

A new free tool called Google Ad Planner to potentially increase its already widespread influence.

It’s 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. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications.

So, with Google Ad Planner, you can:

• 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.

The Google Ad Planner account interface consists of:

• An audience definition tool, where you define your audience by language, age, and other criteria.
• A list of sites matching your criteria. The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data for each site to help you make informed decisions about where you might advertise. To make your research more efficient, Google Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

With Google Ad Planner, you can choose to research sites only or create a media plan to save a list of your desired sites and placements for future use.

How does Google Ad Planner work with Google AdWords?

Google Ad Planner can help you identify appropriate sites to target through Google AdWords. First, filter your Google Ad Planner results to display sites in the Google content network and export the appropriate list of sites to a .csv file.

You can then take any of the following actions in your AdWords account:

• Create a Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
• Edit an existing Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
• Use Google AdWords Editor to add placements to your ad groups: You won’t need to create a new spreadsheet, because Google Ad Planner has already done it for you. Simply copy sites from your .csv file directly into AdWords Editor.