Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who Gets Most Traffic Of Them All?
Posted by: Ben Ashton in GoogleAfter launching the Google Trends tool for websites, Google goes one step further with the Google Ad Planner. As a matter of fact the Google Trends for websites was only a commercialized spin off product from the original Ad Planner. Where the Trends tool indicates which sites have been popular in a recent past, the Ad planner gives specific aggregated demographic visitor data about these sites in order to inform advertisers. Currently the Ad Planner is out in a beta invite only version, but we can probably expect more of it soon.
The Ad Planner discloses information such as other visited sites, keyword information, sex, age, education or income for a broad range of popular sites like newspapers, tv channels etc. The research filtering tool looks like the most interesting tool of the Ad planner: just enter the demographics you are after and get the list of websites that suit your target market. Sites containing Adsense can be filtered out as well. For the moment no possibility exist to directly buy advertising space through the ad planner and no brokerage system is set up to link your Adwords account with the Ad planner.
The question is where the data come from. As usual Google is not so keen on disclosing information about their innovations and this time it is no different. Google search data, opt-in external consumer panel data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data are blended together and the result is a nice overview in Ad Planner. Third parties provide market research mateterial to spice up the sauce and some Google algorithms make it complete. They tell us what they are cooking, but don’t give away the recipe.
Nevertheless this tool is useful for every online marketer with a big enough budget to advertise among the big guys on the internet. Hopefully Google will release a public version soon enough so we can have a go ourselves. In the mean time, stick to Google Trends for Websites.
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