Google Ad Planner: right audience for your campaigns

In our ongoing effort to give you in-depth data for your media plan, we've released a number of Google Ad Planner enhancements that provide a more granular view of where your audience can be found.

Subdomain data
We've added subdomain data to Google Ad Planner to give you a more detailed view of sites. This information can help you refine your media plan by providing more information about specific pages.

With subdomain data, you can search for subdomains; view the top subdomains based on total domain traffic for a site; view traffic, demographics and other data for the subdomain itself; and add subdomains to your media plan. Learn how to search for subdomains.

Ad placements
Ad placements are specific sections on a website where advertising can be purchased, such as the middle right section of a page.

Google Ad Planner now offers ad placement data so that you can make better informed decisions about where to target your ads. You can review placement data for sites in the Google Content Network, and beta test publishers using Google Ad Manager. Additional placement data is coming soon. Learn how to search for ad placements in Google Ad Planner.

Reach and relevance at a glance
With our new interactive graph, you can easily see which sites in your plan provide the best reach and relevance. In its default setting, the graph will compare sites in your search results by audience reach and composition index. Sites with the most reach will appear in the top-left quadrant. Sites with the most relevance will appear in the bottom-right quadrant. Sites near the top-right quadrant will have the best combination of both reach and relevance. You can customize the graph to visualize and compare sites in a variety of ways.

(Click to see full size image)

In the example above, a graph of sites reaching seniors age 65 or older shows that newsmax.com has the best relevance, facebook.com has the best reach, and nytimes.com has a mix of both.

More detailed publisher data
Publishers and site owners can now use Google Ad Planner to share additional Google Analytics data points such as page views, unique visitors, total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on site. As a result, you can feel even more confident in the accuracy of Ad Planner data, and make better informed decisions about the sites you include in your media plan.

Google Ad Planner

If you're a media planner at an ad agency, you know that planning an online display buy can be challenging, particularly in scaling your campaign's reach while keeping it relevant for your target audience. Plus, how do you keep track of the millions of sites out there that might be just right for your campaign?

To make your life easier, we're introducing Google Ad Planner, 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.

While Google Trends for Websites, announced last week, is designed for all users, Google Ad Planner is designed with media planners in mind. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications. Or, you can export to DoubleClick's MediaVisor, which helps you manage all your other media planning, buying and campaign management activities.

We hope you'll find this tool useful and discover many relevant sites--small and large--that would otherwise be hard to find. As Ad Planner is a new product, it's currently available by invitation only. If you're interested in trying it out, you can apply here.

Google Adds “Page Preview” To Search Options

Google Operating System noticed Google has added a new search option named “page preview.” If you go to Google, search on something and click on “show options,” you can then look towards the button on the left hand side and click on “page previews.” For example, here is a view of a search for apple with page preview selected.

Google added a new option to the web search toolbelt: page previews. If you click on "Show options" and select "Page previews" after performing a search, Google will show a longer snippet and a thumbnail for each search result.

Google's thumbnails include a small part of the page, so they aren't always helpful. Another issue is that all the thumbnails from a search results pages are merged and the resulting image doesn't load instantly.

As you can see, Google adds thumbnails of the page directly on the search results.

Page previews is nothing new to search, Ask.com did it with binoculars and there are many Firefox add-ons that add page previews to the Google search results.