Google Ad Planner

Google has introduced yet another research tool. After already having giving the analytics industry a major shake up, Google is now giving companies like Nielsen Online or Compete.com a run for their money.

The idea behind Ad Planner is to help gain a better view of the online landscape when planning ads. Of course with any great tool, it also has the ability to many things, and do them very well.

Unlike many other sources of web information, Google takes it’s information from their web servers to gain insight into traffic quantity and make up. This differs from companies like Alexa which use mainly plug in tool bars or other types of sample based methodology.

Ad Planner offers the ability to see information such as:

-Traffic make up (unique visitors, page views)
-Historical traffic (trended over the prior year)
-Related sites by visitors
-Keywords leading to the original site
-Demographics by gender, age, education, and household income

The insights are tremendous. There is some debate about how exactly Google is pulling in all of this information. Some believe this may be from geographic data for items such as household income and education level. Gender would need to be derived by another method, so it’s difficult to say exactly what is under the hood of the new Google ride.

And if nothing else has, hey just like almost everything else from Goolge…it’s free. Check it out: http://www.google.com/adplanner

June 30th, 2008