Google Ad Planner Indroduced

June 26th, 2008 by Nate Linnell

Yesterday, Google announced a new media research and planning tool called Google Ad Planner. It is targeted to media planners and is intended to allow them to easily create media plans based on the demographics of their target audience or sites that the media planner knows their target audience frequents. The tool will then allow the media planner to dig deeper into the details of each site that matches their criteria to find the optimal mix of sites for the particular buy.

The sites that are included in the database include both those that are in the Google content network as well as other sites from across the Web.

If the new tool is adopted by media planners, Google stands to really benefit. I don’t have the statistics, but I would be willing to guess that there isn’t significant demand for the non-text based creative inventory in the Google content network. If Google Ad Planner is adopted by media planners the inventory is likely to be in higher demand which in turn will drive up the costs for the inventory.

It can also potentially benefit advertisers since it will allow media planners to find many smaller sites that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about. This should allow for media buys to have a greater reach at a potentially lower cost since, at least initially, there won’t be the demand for the impressions on the smaller niche sites that are likely included in the Google Ad Planner database.

It will be interesting to see if media planners are willing to give Google Ad Planner a shot. I would say it’s at least worth testing to see how it compares to the current methods that media planners are using. As long as the buys are being properly tracked and the visitor behavior is being analyzed using the sites web analytics package, then it should be fairly easy to determine if the new tool is cost effective.

For the launch Google has made Ad Planner invitation only so if you’re interested make sure to apply.

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