How to Research Two Strategic Marketing Essentials with Google Ad Planner

Google Ad Planner is one of my favorite free media planning tool that can help Advertisers find which websites their target audience visits to make better-informed advertising decisions. Since the Google AdWords team recently redesigned the user-interface to facilitates research, it prompted us to write this article for you. Unlike other 3rd party non-Google tools, you can display data using a combination of demographics, geography, Google Search keywords and commonly visited sites.

This is one of the first full articles I will write on promotion strategies, make sure to bookmark this site for further reference!

Using Google Ad Planner as Publishers and Bloggers

Google Ad Planner is rather limited for publishers (website owners, webmaster, bloggers, etc.), there is a variety of other tools for their purpose but here we will show you that you should not completely ignore this tool.

You can use this advertiser tool to can gain some valuable information which can help you better position your website, frame your target audience and know who your competitors are.  Therefore, we will split this article in two sections:

1. Audience Targeting and Profiling: Who is your audience? I mean, really, their age, gender, income, etc...
2. Competitive Analysis: Who are your competitors? We like to call them related sites.

As example to guide you through this, we will be using Digg.com since it is a very popular platform aimed at technology geeks.  Disclaimer: The following is not intended to be a full or professional analysis of Digg's marketing position. The data represented are estimates and may change by the time you read this article.

Audience Targeting and Profiling

Knowing your audience a strategic step in building your site and is more important than keyword targeting or search engine optimization (SEO).  It will be one of the core question to be asking on every post you will publish: Who are you writing for?  Often enough, you know what they search for (your content).  Now, how do you know who you are actually writing for? How old are they? Do they have the money to buy your products? You can claim that this is up to Google's AdWords' algorithm to work its magic but a little optimization and insight would not hurt. (full list embedded lower)

Google's Predefined Audiences

Traditional marketing often requires that you know your target audience when you are selling a product or even publishing a website or blog. The reason behind this is that people with different demographics or profiles will behave differently. With Google Ad Planner, you can achieve a level of targeting to "profiling" instead of simple demographic data by combining the keyword search data.  Think of personality archetypes in a video game like Resident Evil or a fiction book... For example, you have the cop, the female researcher, the motherly sister; do they all behave the same way? No.  Knowing the profile of your visitor is also something fun to imagine when you write.

Finding Audience Profiles Based on Keywords

To find the details on your target audience is as easy as doing a search, only if you have an established website.  If you have a relatively new and growing website, you have to use a similar site as yours.  There MUST be at least a popular one that is close to yours.

When you type in the domain name, you should be able to see the audience information:

Yes, this is publicly available.  This is nice and perhaps impressive if you did not previously collect this type of information on your website.  But how do you add the profiling to all this?

• You will need to return to the "Search by audience" tab.
• Click on the "Load audience" button.
• There will be a list of, shall I say, stereotypical profiles of people.
• When you load the selected list, the demographic and search attributes will be displayed, along with a list of websites matching this.
• The goal in profiling your audience would be to match the peaks of your chart and the categories with the audience profile name while having some context in mind.
• Once you found your audience profile, you also gain the benefit of finding out competitive or related sites (second part below)

To better help you find an audience profile match, here is a table of the data Google Ad Planner loads (52 audiences):

View full version in Google Docs

Many Additional Advantages

There are additional advantages of knowing your target audience, such as making some sense of the value of your keyword if your goal is monetization and knowing if affiliate marketing will work.  You can also use these profile names on your "Advertise" page to speak the language of marketing professionals.  For example, "IT Decision Makers" might read more industry news and even politics and see contextual ads on enterprise products a "Technology Geek" will never buy.

The important thing to remember, this is a strategic exercise and it might be hard to grasp the immediate results without further insights depending on whether you want to stick to what you are doing or start something new.

Competitive Analysis

It is important to know who are your competitors otherwise you will not be able to know if your published content is unique (one of the key requirements to success). We will not be doing a complete competitive analysis, this will be reserved for a later post. Now that you know who and which keywords you are targeting, you can easily view who are you competitors.

Using Related Sites

When we displayed the results from "Search by Site", you can find a table labeled "Sites also visited" under the demographics and geography data.  This is the easiest way to find your related and competitor websites but may not always work. Google Ad Planner calculates an affinity score which "estimates how many times more likely you are to reach an audience who visits a specific site or searches for specific keywords versus an audience on the internet overall."

For our Digg example, the table only displays advertising networks:

This is most likely caused by the ad networks displaying ads on Digg.  Let's take another example which also caters to Technology geeks (ArsTechnica):

Here we have a more accurate representation of sites that ArsTechnica's audience is most likely to also visit.  We can infer that these websites could be ArsTechnica's competitors since their content are similar.

Search by Audience

Returning to our Digg example, we will try to find the list of websites using the target audience.  Wait a minute, this is the original design of Google Ad Planner!

Go to the "Search by Audience" tab and use the "Site visited" and "Keywords searched" filters to enter "digg" and "digg.com" respectively.  Also on the "Filter", change the "Ranking method" to "Best match" and uncheck "Accepts advertising" under "Ad items", this will prevent displaying only the most trafficked websites and to show sites that may be not accepting ads (not our goal).

Now we have Digg on top of the list followed by a longer list of related site.  We will not post the long image but recommend that you try for yourself.  By using the table sort functions, you can get a good sense of Digg's related sites

About "Competition"

A closing note on competition, we have to remember that the cost of visiting or linking to a website is practically zero (only your attention span).  The term "competition" is hardly the same as the one used in business but since Google Ad Planner is foremost a business tool, we are using this term.

More About Google Ad Planner

Google recently offered publishers to share their Google Analytics data in Google Ad Planner to show real values instead of estimate data.  This goes with the logic that better advertiser decision through increased accuracy also benefits publishers.  Before you run off to crunch your marketing data, here is a brief video on Google Ad Planner by Google:

On a closing note, please let us know about your findings in the comments.

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