Planning online display advertising can be challenging, particularly in scaling your company’s campaign reach while keeping it relevant for your target audience.  To help in the pursuit of efficient and effective online media plans, Google introduced a new tool on June 24th called Ad Planner.  Ad Planner is marketed as a research and media planning tool that will give advertisers another way to measure their media audience and help measure ROI. Currently, Ad Planner is in a beta version and is available for use by invitation only. The service will be free and available to all after the initial trial period.

Ad Planner may prove to be an effective tool, and offers some interesting features. It allows companies to search for attractive Web sites to place their ads using demographic and usage criteria. Companies can also find out the other sites their target audience is visiting. Business product manager of Google, Wayne Lin cited the example of ESPN.com, showing that visitors to this site also tend to visit cnnsi.com and Cubs.com. Additionally, Ad Planner can provide keywords that were used as search terms.

Google seems to be positioning the tool to reach the long-tail of the internet. This means that the tool will not focus on large Web sites but rather help companies reach niche consumers.

Although Google Ad Planner may be a useful tool, it should be used with caution. Google claims to use outside data as well as their own, but they do not disclose any specific sources. Users should be concerned about the conflicts of interest as Google sells advertising space. The service is not equipped with costs or a brokerage system to enable buying. So companies will still need to seek out vendors or professional media buyers. The service should be seen as a starting point and used in conjunction with other research tools.

Seybold is currently investigating ways to use Ad Planner to improve service to our clients.