Google Ad Planner Review - Standard demographic break down
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Let's apply the filters and see what Google gives us for our fictional target audience, which is male businessmen, 35 - 64, with household incomes between $50,000 and $149,000.
The country is set to the United States. In the language section I select English. The gender is set to "male." The age brackets checked include "35 - 44," "45 - 54" and "55 - 64." The income brackets checked include "$50,000 - $74,999," "$75,000 - $99,999" and "$100,000 - $149,999."
As you click on the boxes, the left side, which contains web sites, refreshes on the go (AJAX).
Here are some of the sites Ad Planner returned for the criteria:
yahoo.com
go.com
facebook.com
cnn.com
craigslist.org
weather.com
nytimes.com
casalemedia.com
mapquest.com
wordpress.com
nfl.com
zedo.com
huffingtonpost.com
wired.com
bizrate.com
monster.com
wachovia.com
There are several hundred websites available in the Ad Planner. Do you think the example list above is a good way to reach our audience? Leave your comments.
I personally think it's not detailed enough. Everyone goes to Craigslist and Monster. We need something more refined, so let's nag Google a bit more.
On the bottom we can add more filters. One of the filters is "keywords."
Enter any keywords you want and Google will do more filtering. In our example website list shrank a little, but I was very surprised to find this name on the list: thepiratebay.org.
I added a few more keywords, but Google didn't change the results that much. Let's try adding a three-word key phrase to find out if using the long tail yields better results. With "business management software," Google still gave a few, in my humble opinion, irrelevant websites: photobucket.com, digg.com, sportsline.com, walmart.com.
There is one more filter called "audience matching." You can enter any website you want and Google will try to find relevant sites in its Ad Planner network. Since we're going after "business management software" I decided to put in this address: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/dynamics/
I Think it's a pretty good representation of our target.
A few seconds later Ad Planner gave us a brand new list, and there are still some questionable results: craigslist.org, imdb.com, photobucket.com, digg.com. Hmmm... I have a feeling our three latest filters, two keywords and a web site example had no effect on the results.
On the bright side there are many relevant sites, such as nytimes.com, casalemedia.com, washingtonpost.com and linkedin.com.
I selected 30 websites and added them to the media plan. Here's how it looks statistically:
Even after specifying "male," the Ad Planner ratio is pretty big.
The age is on target with only few points in 0 - 34 category.
The education and income levels are somewhat on target.
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