Google Launches Ad Planner – A Web Analytic Tool for Media Planners [6/30/2008]

On June 24, Google launched a beta version of its new web analytic tool for media planners – Ad Planner. This comes barely after launching Google Web Trends, a web analytic tool for all Internet users.

What Exactly is Ad Planner?

Ad Planner allows media professionals to locate sites that a web marketer’s target audience is likely to frequent. It does this based on various sets of metrics, e.g., site traffic and demographics. This tool allows media professions to target very specific areas of a target market, e.g., their education level, household income, age range and gender.

Playing to a global market, this service is also able to serve up information on a site’s potential international reach, its unique visitors and even keywords that the target market might use in a search.

The reason behind this latest foray into web analytic service offerings is seen by many industry experts as Google’s bid to garner more display ad revenue. Because web tracking data will be available to advertising executives at no cost, this opens the door for smaller ad houses and Internet marketers.

Google is able to offer this type of service free because of its deep pockets. This allows it to compete with current industry leaders like Hitwise, comScore and Nielsen Online. All three of these charge subscription fees for access to their data; while Ad Planner – at least currently, does not charge subscription fees. This is expected to particularly interest smaller advertisers, as many of them traditionally have not been able to afford high-priced web tracking resources.

How Does Ad Planner Work When Stacked Against Comparable Web Analytic Tools?

Pulling from an internal resource, Google compiles some of its data from the Google Toolbar. It also pulls on other resources readily available to the company, e.g., search results, market research firms it partners with and appropriate third-party networks. In comparison, comScore and Nielsen collect their data via panels and surveys conducted amongst volunteer Web surfers. Hitwise gets its data from ISP networks.

Although each employs different methods to compile their data, industry experts have fired criticism at all of them. The criticism ranges from fragmented web usage from which some info is derived, to limited sample size which makes it tricky to compile reliable results.

One thing Google has in its favor is that it is the industry leader in online search, with a dominating 70% share of the market. What this means is that approximately a third (30%) can’t be tracked, hence won’t be included in Ad Planner data.

For more insight visit Web Analytics services

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