Google launch Ad Planner
Google has launched a new service that helps advertisers discover the key visitor demographics of sites they plan to advertise on.
Google Ad Planner, which has been released as an invitation-only beta, will also suggest other sites that fit the advertisers’ criteria.
Demographic data featured in Google Ad Planner includes visitor age, gender, household income and level of education.
The information will help advertisers identify likely targets for their ads, but the system does not feature any type of ad buying or selling functionality; potential sites will still have to be approached individually.
The service also provides fairly accurate records of the overall popularity of websites, showing the numbers of unique visitors and page views for each site as this report at Search Engine Roundtable indicates. Many media planners have previously relied either on the data the website gives them or on wildly inaccurate data from toolbar based information services such as Alexa and Compete.
Google’s release of Ad Planner follows a recent expansion of the Google Trends service that monitors searches for web addresses rather than just keywords.
However, the apparent freeing up of Google’s vast repository of data isn’t quite as wide-ranging as you might think - information from major Google properties such as their search portals, YouTube, Blogger and Picasa are all excluded.
Google’s excuse? They don’t want to give away guidance on their earnings before they are officially announced. Though oddly it seems OK to include data for Yahoo and Microsoft…
| 
