Few months ago I wrote “Google Enters Ad Management Market.” Last week at the Advertising Research Foundation Audience Measurement Conference, Google announced Google Ad Planner. The target users of Google Ad Planner are primarily advertising agencies. But as far as I know from talking to many of my friends and colleagues in the field, there are mixed feeling toward the recent Google’s move into this area. Some of them see it as a threat if Google decides to open the Ad Planner with all the user demographic profiles exposed to the public.

Alright, this is my first hand experience of beta testing Google Ad Planner. Let’s see what I’ve found:

I’ve created a campaign brief for my test: An exporter in China is looking for a digital media solution, which should help him to reach the potential buyers in the US market. I setup a few parameters to define my reach, Google Ad Planner gives me this snapshot of the demographics.  You can see from the screenshot, Google estimates 1.2 million unique visitors in 2 billion page views. Google also estimates 0.5% internet users within my defined country who meet the demographic criteria that I’ve specified.

I also selected some of the sites (read the site list in the left-hand side screenshot) which I want to allocate my media budget. Google gives me this summary (I am quite surprised to read that the combined country reach of all these famous B2B portals in this region are very insignificant as seen by Google):

Another interesting scene is how Google’s robot categorize the sites:

Globalsources.com and Tradeeasy.com get their most wanted category “Manufacturing.” Alibaba.com is categorized as “Business…..,” not as lovely as what GS has got. The most irrelevant category is HK TDC. Both of its Tdctrade.com and HKTDC.COM are labelled as “Travel.”  According to Google, site categories are determined primarily by automated systems. That means it must have something to do with Google indexing algorithms. Attention SEOs!

Google Ad Planner also provides a site report for each website that tells you visitation history, visitors demographic, and of course, the top searched keywords of the site:

My feeling about Google Ad Planner isn’t particularly impressive compared to other planning tool like Atlas. It doesn’t provide too much intelligence like Nielsen AdRelevance. At the moment, Google Ad Planner is more like a traffic aggregator rather than a planning tool.

How does Google Ad Planner collect data? According to Google:

Google Ad Planner gathers data from multiple sources. This data is then checked against anonymous, aggregate, industry benchmarking data within Google Analytics.Google Ad Planner only uses anonymous Google Analytics data to calibrate category data and correct for under-reporting or over-reporting in certain verticals.

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