by brad
Google adPlanner Makes it Easier to do Demographic & Behavioral Research
8:10 am in Demographics, Google AdWords, PPC Marketing Blog by brad
Google Ad Planner has recently made some updates that make it even easier to define audiences.
The biggest change is more insight into how profile demographics are calculated:
- Added Unique Visitors (cookies), a new cookie-based metric, to help you cross-check and compare metrics, similar to Google Analytics unique visitor metrics.
- Changed Unique Visitors to Unique Visitors (users) so it’s clearer that you’re reviewing estimated numbers of real world users.
- Placed the Unique Visitors (cookies) and Unique Visitors (users) metrics on a site’s profile page so you’ll have a more comprehensive view of how a specific site can support your media planning. Learn how to make the most of these two metrics.
Image and quote source from Inside AdWords.
Easier to Choose Your Target Audience
My favorite change is that there are now pre-defined audiences that you can choose from. This is a brand new feature that you can see in the left image
When you load a new audience, adPlanner will automatically select your typical demographics:
- Gender
- Age
- Education
- Household Income
- Children in Household
However, what’s really nice about this feature is that adPlanner will also pre-select certain behavioral characteristics such as:
- Sites also visited
- Keywords searched
In combining both user demographics and behavioral characteristics; it’s very fast to build an initial profile of sites that match your audience.
Of course, you should know your audience better than adPlanner, so while this is a nice starting place; it probably won’t be your final list.
I’m a big fan of using adPlanner to do placement targeting research.
Once you’re up and running, don’t forget to:
- Run placement performance reports to see how sites are converting
- Block underperforming domains
- Filter your information in Google Analytics for better insight
If you’re still learning adPlanner, here are some videos that will help you get started.
Ad Planner Overview
Defining an Audience:
Reviewing & Profiling Sites
Great post. Its nice to see that people actually use these videos. We’ve had a lot of debate on whether they actually add value for our advertisers. Point for the value team.
I would be really curious to see what you think the major barrier to entry are for smaller advertisers? I have seen great adoption with agencies, and some savvier individuals, but not across the board. Too complicated, not enough press?
I think many of the lesser known issues fall into 2 areas:
Not enough press
Education on how to use them
The lesser known press is what killed preferred cost bidding (still wish that one would come back); once someone knew it existed – they loved it – but it was a PR issue.
The adPlanner looks cool, but there are really two issues:
1. How to extract value from it (i.e. education)
2. Integrated functionality (actually saving time). When you export a list of sites (after filtering in AdWords network) and add them to the placement targeting, often AdWords says those sites aren’t available for placement (when they actually are) and you have to manually hunt for them to add them.
If the export from adPlanner/list URLs in placement worked well OR you could connect adPlanner and placements together – it might help as it really does save a step.
I spent 2 hours yesterday researching sites on adPlanner, and only 1/10th of the URLs actually worked upon listing them in AdWords. I had to spend another 45 minutes adding those sites to a placement campaign which should have taken minutes.
FYI – I love the AdWords videos. I have a channel (youtube.com/ewhisper) which is just subscriptions to AdWords videos to make it easy for people to find them all.