If you're a media planner at an ad agency, you know that planning an online display buy can be challenging, particularly in scaling your campaign's reach while keeping it relevant for your target audience. Plus, how do you keep track of the millions of sites out there that might be just right for your campaign?To make your life easier, we're introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you've added to your media plan.
Google Ad Planner
[google.com...]
related searches for a particular site
...
I'm in.
hope it'll be accurate
[edited by: Miamacs at 6:12 pm (utc) on June 24, 2008]
This is what the search engine is suppose to do, isn't it? I mean, gee, if you're selling widgets, all you have to do is type in "widgets" into Google and the top web site are the top web sites. That's where you put your ads, right? Simple.
OK, not so simple. Gonna be interesting.
Also are they using data from Analytics people that opted to share their data?
God the never stop do they?
So I guess G will be able to profile your site far better on this if you're using Google Analytics, so if you want to be profiled, you'll be wanting to use GA.
Does anyone have an opinion as to whether or not this will materially impact Comscore's business?
It will and Nielsen Online's too. I fear Google is now getting too monopolistic in the advertising world online and offline - and this is not good for any business. The worst to suffer will be the small advertisers.
Gs new service seems like a natural progression in their marketing plan and will make sense to alot of people. The thing is that no other company has access to the amount of personal data that G does so there's not much competition out there.
I'm signing up... sounds like an interesting tool
Yes - it's dead dude [finance.google.com]. That is an EX company (insert dead parrot sketch here). Comscore is in the dark ages compared to what Google can offer.
Google has so many data sources now - that you basically can't hide. Those that think the G data set is coming from the toolbar are only looking at a subfractional part of what Google has for data sources:
- Google Analytics. Most people don't even know they are constantly being tracked or bugged by Google Analytics bugs across and ever growing number of unconnected sites). The data set from GA has to be getting into freakin scary unreal territory. Google probably has more sources of data from Google Analytics (and the associated referral logs), than the rest of the site tracking/analytics firms combined. All of Googles other site tracking and click data much be dwarfed by the awesome data set that is Google Analytics. They have never publicly said how many domains are using GA, but we can say with some confidence, that it is well into the millions by now. The referral data could give Google a real time look at traffic through out the internet. They probably know more about traffic at their top 50 competitors than the competitors do themselves. If someone could do a mashup between Google Trends, Google Analytics, and Google maps (which we know Google has on a global scale) and make that public - oh boy :-) - Google AdSense (think about how many sites run this and how many times your browser connects to Google to get ads). Not to mention your clicks on some of those ads. It is like an extension of Google Analytics for the sites that don't run Analytics. Everytime a browser dl's a set of Ads, it is tracked along with the referral.
- ISP Relationships (like EarthLink and others). We can only guess at how much data ISP's are willingly giving over to Google.
- Site search forms on partner sites. (G drives CNN and Washpost site search - among tens of thousands of others)
- Search Data, Map Data, Blog Data, News Data - and your clicks on that data.
- Google Toolbar (what a gold mine for behavioral analysis, but not much use for analytical/tracking analysis)
- Partner sites (Aol, Yahoo). Adds to the massive query logs.
- SubCompany sites (DoubleClick, Blogger, YouTube ...etc) and the log files those companies brought to Google. I have heard that the first thing Google engineers asked for after the deal was done was to, "send us all your log files".
- Google Checkout. Consider the buttons on sites that are linked to Google. This is minor though compared to GA, but Google Checkout helps Google acquire data from the first search through the final payment process. This has helped Google get a complete craddle-to-grave life cycle picture of the online buy cycle. No one outside of ISP and ISP caching logs has similar data.
- Google Enterprise Search Box. (Beyond the Firewall: where no search engine has gone before). Few companies have data on user behavior within intranets. This data might also be a hidden gem of the Toolbar.
- Google Services: Gmail, Google Docs, iGoogle start page, Google Alerts, Google Reader. What and how Google can deduce and use from these services is debatable, but it is incredible circumstantial and behavioral data that adds to the mythical database of intentions.
With proper demographic, psychographic, and behavioral analysis, the things Google can deduce about a user would be almost unlimited. Considering the massive data set that could be analyzed, we should almost come up with an entirely new name and category for the scientists who will analyze the data. They are going to be able to break new ground new data interpretation.
Lets look at some of things Google could be able to deduce about you (in varying degrees):
- your income (from your location and surf habits)
- your job (your work ip and search habits)
- your spouse and family relationships
- your sexual preferences
- whether you own your home or not
- if you are married
- your social relationships
- your websites visitors better than you know them
This [neurosciencemarketing.com] is a very important site to read. Google is making deep inroads into understanding the human online behavior, buy cycle, and predicting it from psychographic data. eg: they didn't buy DoubleClick for their platform, or sales portfolio - they bought it for the 10 year data cache that doubleclick had amassed. The platform and portfolio were just nice perks.
Google probably spends as much time analyzing data, as they do working on the core search engine itself. What you see now with adplanner, will be a work-in-process : eg, this is the worst it will ever be. Some have hinted, that G may be intentionally dumbing down or watering down the data to thwart some of the blow back that is naturally occurring.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 3:53 pm (utc) on July 2, 2008]
Detailed Screen Shots of Google's New Ad Planner :: Wow!
[seroundtable.com...]
I found one rather egregious error; the Category type for one of my clients is way off. As in way way way off. I'm sure there's no way to correct it, but I wish I knew whose rear end they pulled it out of.
Looking at all this data, I don't know whether to be elated or terrified.
Jake referred to one of my posts about it as a little too close to a tin foil rant
I was a bit more naive at that point. ;-)
Google probably spends as much time analyzing data
There's a controversial op-ed talking about Google as the end of scientific modeling [wired.com] over at Wired today.
From that article:
For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
In a previous life we used to have an expression: "It's the data, stupid."
I don't like it, but on the plus side, it might stop the companies mentioned from resting on their (sometimes arrogant) laurels.
Here's the thing about that: Googles service is the worst it is ever going to be today. While at the same time, those other services have pushed their technology to the limits. Google's data acquisistion machinery and traffic is only going to make G's data set better and better.
