Google has released a new media-planning tool called Ad Planner that connects advertisers with publishers. Wayne Lin, business product manager at Google, spoke of the tool’s benefits at the ARF’s Audience Measurement 3.0 today in New York.
“The focus [of Google Ad Planner] is primarily on creating more brand lift and brand awareness [for advertsiers],” Lin told DMNews.
The free tool, which is in its first beta release, lets users enter demographics and sites associated with a target audience and then suggests sites – both within and outside of Google’s network – that the target audience is likely to visit. Lin said he expected the tool to be used both by publishers and marketers.
The tool lets advertisers match demographics and related searches for a particular site, or aggregate statistics for sites in the advertisers’ buying plan.
“This will expose many more sites that are much deeper into the Web,” Lin said. “It opens up data that wasn’t necessary visible before.”
Lin would not elaborate on specifics of how the data is pulled, but said that Google’s wide reach and powerful analytics would provide information on the long tail of the Web.
In terms of its impact on direct marketing, Lin said, “Brand advertisers might not necessarily be paying attention to smaller Web sites, while direct marketers are willing to take more risks and go where performance is.”
This new technology offering comes a week after an update to Google Trends, which measures Web site traffic and exports normalized search volume numbers on keywords.
Advertisers can create media plans and export .csv files, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications, within the new tool.
