Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

There’s been a lot of chatter about Google’s new Ad Planner so I decided to sign up just to see what all the craziness was about. After about 12 hours, this email came in from Google:

Thanks for your interest in Google Ad Planner. We’re happy to announce that you’ve been accepted into our beta testing program.

To get started, visit www.google.com/adplanner and sign in with your Google Account username and password.

If you need immediate assistance with Google Ad Planner, please visit our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/. We also welcome your suggestions and feedback at http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/request.py.

Welcome to Google Ad Planner!

Sincerely,
The Google Ad Planner Team

Great, time to play.

When you first login to Google Ad Planner, you are presented with two options: Create a new media plan or Begin research. Let’s start with Begin research.

The first screen you will see after clicking on Begin research is a listing of all the sites that Google has data on (presumably from the Google Toolbar).  Towards the top of the left sidebar, you are presented with 3 key metrics that refresh based on your selection of demographic filters below. Combining all of the sites selected by default, Google supposedly has 100% country reach which equals 240M unique visitors and 180B page views.

What is likely the bread and butter of Google Ad Planner, the demographics filters allow you to drill down by filtering sites by gender, age, education, and household income. Google Ad Planner also allows a user to specify demographics based on a specified site. For example, selecting techcrunch.com, Ad Planner will display demographically similar sites such as crunchbase, techmeme, ycombinator, and scobleizer. You can also enter more than one site to search against if you need to drill down further.

Once you have narrowed down your demographic filters by using one of the two methods I have outlined above, you can now sift through the results on the right hand side. Selecting multiple updates a metric aggregator towards the top of the Ad Planner page with total site statistics and selects them for inclusion in a media plan. The metrics that are presented are Category (Computers & Electronics for example), Comp Index (Score showing how concentrated your audience is on a site relative to users in your defined country), Unique Visitors, Country Reach (Estimated percent of total internet users within your defined country), Page Views, and Google Content specific metrics including Ad Formats and Impressions per Day. It’s important to note that not all the sites in Ad Planner are part of the Google Content Network.

Google Ad Planner also has the handy option of drilling down even further per site by clicking on a little graph icon next to the site name (reminiscent of Quantcast site metrics) for insight into its demographics and traffic data/patterns which looks to be like a perfect integration of Google Site Trends (btw, why does the Google Site Trends page default to Wikipedia stats?) released just last week. Unfortunately, as of right now, it looks like Quantcast does present more data than Ad Planner does – Ad Planner only displays data that I have covered in this post.

That’s about it for the research module (let me know if I left anything out here). Now let’s move on to actually creating media plans.

Another important note is that Google Ad Planner doesn’t yet seem to be integrating with your Adwords accounts for one-click plan implementation for your content campaign. The only thing that the Media Plan option provides is an exportable (CSV or MediaVisor CSV) and an overview of all your selected sites.

So that’s basically it. Out of the box, this tool isn’t incredibly useful but the functionality is definitely there for future improvements. I look forward to seeing what the Google Ad Planner team has in store for us.

Let me begin by saying that I am by no means an expert in email marketing. However, that statement just might qualify me to write about an experience that I have with a certain car dealership and its marketing techniques.

I used to own a 2006 Volkswagen GTI and have brought it in for service at Reydel, a local Volkswagen dealership. For those that have ever owned first model year Volkswagens, you know what it’s like: the car’s in the shop every other month, for the full month. During that service, I did the unthinkable: I gave them my email address. Now, I never provide my email address for fear of spam, but they caught me off-guard.

Ever since I gave them my email address, I have received nothing but targeted emails from them. Their emails are one of the only mass marketing emails that I read these days, just to see what they’ve come up with next. I receive emails that remind me of my next oil change, 35k mile service, owner discounts, and exclusive test drives.

These people just get it. They understand that Volkswagen drivers (victims?) are a different breed; these people love their cars and will do anything to make sure they’re in top shape. They are also the type of consumers that eat up exclusive test drives and online service scheduling. So, Reydel: that’s a win for you!