Cross posted from the Google Agency Ad Solutions Blog
We recently introduced a new umbrella name for our online display media offerings, the Google Display Network (GDN), to make our advertising solutions clear. You also heard from us about the investments we’re making in display advertising and the promise it holds to drive great marketing results. In this series of posts, we’ll cover what you can do today on the GDN.
We’ve been busy working to improve every step of your display campaigns: from media planning and developing creative to choosing targeting, measuring results and improving your campaign. Each week over the next month, we’ll talk about the solutions available to you in each area, starting with campaign planning.
With millions of sites on the web, how do you find the exact people who’ll respond to your message? We introduced DoubleClick Ad Planner to help. It’s a free research and media planning tool to help identify web sites most likely to attract your audience. The insights provided by Ad Planner continue to get deeper and more robust. Let’s take a look:
Research sites by those you know your audience visits, or by defining your audience based on what you know about them. This can include geography, demographics, interests, sites they visit or keywords they search. Recently, we released more features to help you research more effectively:
- Pre-defined audiences: select from commonly used audiences like Baby Boomers to save time or if you don’t know how to define your audience.
- Ad Planner 1000: quickly reference and target the web’s largest sites.
- Subdomain and ad placementdata: do more granular media planning.
- Lists: create lists of your favorite sites and placements for future use.
Manage your site results by applying a variety of site ranking methods:
- See sites that are most likely to attract your target audience, as well as larger, mass-media sites to ensure campaign scale. Or, see a balance between the two.
- Filter to see just sites in the Google Display Network, or all sites that accept advertising.
- Apply other filters to see sites accepting certain ad formats, sites in specific categories like Video Games or sites with a particular domain suffix like .edu.
View robust site details. For each site, you can see detailed information and audience visitation patterns. The Site Overview shows general site information like a site thumbnail, description and site categories. Traffic Statistics and Demographics show unique visitor metrics and demographic information. Online Activity shows what other sites your audience visits or keywords they search. Finally, Ad Specifications show placement type, impressions/day and accepted ad formats and sizes. Most recently, we introduced audience interest information, showing the aggregate interests of a site’s visitors. It complements the demographic data available in Ad Planner, providing a deeper view into a site’s audience.
Build, analyze and export your media plan. After researching, you can select sites and add them to your media plan. As you do, you’ll see unique users, reach, and page view statistics. You can then analyze your media plan by reviewing its aggregate demographic statistics. When you’re ready, you can export sites directly into your AdWords account or into CSV format to import into MediaVisor.
Beyond robust features like these, Ad Planner provides true scale for your campaigns. With it, you can go beyond the most common sites, tapping into millions of others in over 40 countries and 20 languages. Web site owners can also claim, manage and share their data on Ad Planner, providing another level of up-to-date and accurate information for your media planning.
You can stay on top of new enhancements in our Ad Planner release notes. Stay tuned for our next post about developing effective ads and the solutions available on the Google Display Network.
Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network
