Advertisers can now build media plans to reach audiences with interests relevant to their campaigns using DoubleClick Ad Planner. Audience interests represent the aggregate interests of visitors to any given website. With today’s release, the top ten audience interests for each site are now listed on the profile page for each of the millions of sites profiled in Ad Planner. This provides an important complement to the demographic data that’s already widely available. By combining an understanding of a website’s demographic appeal with the range of interests of the audience the site attracts, advertisers can get a more complete picture of who they will reach by advertising on the site.
To date in Ad Planner, advertisers have used site categories, which describe the content of websites, as a proxy for audience interests. For example, to plan an ad campaign for a pet product, advertisers would look for sites with content about pets for their media plan. While this may be an appropriate proxy, it also may overlook some great sites, since when people are interested in a topic, they don’t only visit sites about that topic. Audience interests in Ad Planner helps advertisers find a wider range of sites for their media plan without compromising their ability to reach the right audience.
With the “Search by audience” tab in Ad Planner, selecting the “Pets” interest will reveal a list of sites that have a high affinity with audiences interested in pets. While some of the sites will be about pets, many additional sites will be about other topics. Take the screenshot below, which is from the Ad Planner profile for a site about politics. Although the site is not about pets, it scores a high (36.9x) affinity with audiences who are interested in pets, which means visitors to this site are 36.9 times more likely to be interested in pets than the average Internet population. A category filter on pets would never locate this site, but an interests search on pets would.
Audience interests gives advertisers a new tool for selecting the best sites for their media plans. To learn more about how we generate the data for audience interests, please refer to our methodology document. To try out the new audience interests features, visit www.google.com/adplanner.
[note: this post has been reprinted from the DoubleClick Blog]
