Review of Google Ad Planner: Site Targeting Cheat Sheet

I recently spent hours playing with Ad Planner Beta, Google’s newest Adwords tool. If you thought Adwords Editor made your life easier, consider being spoon fed with Ad Planner. The program is amazing, especially if you site target on Google’s content network. It’s a lot like Quantcast, only much more accurate.

Google Does the Work for You

Demographic Filters

Just type in any URL and the tool will group it with other relevant sites. To get even more laser targeted, there is a demographics option where you choose:

• location
• language
• age
• education,
• income and
• gender

Site & Category Filters

After getting the results, you can sort through the data according to

• impressions
• page views
• unique visitors
• index
• category

You can find sites with audiences related to any particular site. Here are sites related to seobook.com

And for any particular site you can find audience details, similar to those provided in Google Website Trends, but with the addition of demographics information.

Filter by AdSense Formats

Here’s the fun part – You can easily handpick relevant sites that are involved in the Google content network. It even allows you to choose the types of media available.

Tons of Great Opportunities

While site targeted advertising tends to be less profitable than keyword targeted ads, if you’re using the content network for brand exposure or e-commerce, the Ad Planner can help you research and reach your target market.

And there are a variety of great non-AdWords related uses for this tool

• compare your traffic levels to competing sites
• find sites worth doing direct ad deals with
• find affiliate sites worth emulating
• find sites worth pitching stories to or writing guest columns for
• find sites worth buying links from or buying outright