July 03, 2008 | Thursday
Google launches media planning tool with Ad Planner
By Stuart Thurstan - Digital Media Director in Display |Latitude Publications |Articles |Marketing |News |Online Sales |Search Engines |Google
Google Ad Planner is launching in the US allowing media planners to identify publisher sites with relevant audiences. Much the same as the extended functionality now available in Google Trends this must raise a question of how close are Google to emulating Hitwise and Comscore? Ad Planner in the US is free and this will inevitably affect the web measurement industry.
It is believed the new Ad Planner tool will gather information about websites from a range of sources, including its own search engine but also via third parties and consumer panels. Scepticism is racing across the blogs of the US digital media industry of course - such a tool must be neutral and not bias advertisers toward buying on Google properties or those that have Google ads, which is going to be a perceived bias in any case.
As the interface grab posted on Google’s official blog: http://www.adwords.blogspot.com shows the tool will make it easy to compile aggregated website statistics for a media plan. And Google hint at reaching sites previously ‘hard to find’ both ‘small and large’.
The hype so far makes Ad Planner sound very useful, although it won’t be a one stop shop for media planning when it launches in Europe and the UK – as with most early versions it is a limited. I would use it for research to maximise a plan or to help find those niche, relevant and ‘cost effective’ publisher sites.
Comments
#1
I stumbled across this blog and I see that there is a lot of useful and interesting stuff here. I am an account planner, and am curious to learn a bit more about media planning online (do you have any general articles on this subject?). Thanks.