With online media planning, there are many challenges. How do you reach the proper audience that will not only click through to your site, but also convert? How to make sure your site is relevant to the audience that will benefit the most from your product or service? How can you best utilize the available web resources to gain the necessary insight for increased conversions? Google’s answer to these questions and more is Ad Planner.

Ad Planner is a media planning tool where you can research multiple sites in which to target your Placement program. With Ad Planner you can identify websites that your customers or potential customers are likely to visit. Ad Planner allows you to define your audience by demographics and commonly visited sites. You can get multiple details for sites including page views, unique visitors, keywords, audience composition, and many other demographic details. For example, say you wanted to set up a Content Placement program targeting 20 to 30 year old males with a median income of $60,000. You can plug in the query details and Ad Planner will provide a list of sites that the aforementioned demographics visit on a regular basis. Ad Planner helps to make that leap from the description of your audience to the actual activity of the audience. Ad Planner will help to define very niche audiences and find relevant sites which would otherwise be difficult to reach. It also helps you to find web surfing patterns to better finely tune your Content Placement program.

The Ad Planner data comes from multiple resources and, from preliminary test results, seems to be up to date and accurate. The demographic data comes from aggregated Google search data, opt in anonymous Google Analytics data, consumer panel data, and third party market research. The data is aggregated and weighed into an algorithm to create the Ad Planner tool.

Ad Planner is still in its beginning stages and is still very primitive compared to other, more established Google tools that are available. However, even at its most basic form, the Ad Planner tool has multiple advantages including enhanced Placement planning, fast execution with regard to site discovery, improved quality regarding site targeting, and a higher potential for increasing your bottom line with regard to conversions.