Boston Web Consulting
Search Engine Optimization and Adwords Reporting

Google Adwords has introduced Google Ad Planner. What is it?

To make your life easier, we’re introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

You can read more here.

Notice that you can fine tune your ad purchased by demographics and related searches. This is obviously good news for advertisers as it should help them target their ads. Let’s not for now question how Google is collecting this data - can you say toolbar? Privacy Issues? Does Google have an unfair advantage in the market? Is search heading down the utility path of being regulated? I think regulation is down the road - probably far down the road. But in the mean time, it is great to be an Google Adwords advertiser.

Google Adwords has just announced demographic bidding which came out of beta/testing.  So what is it?

It’s a feature that helps you target your ads to users of a particular age group (such as ages 18-24), by gender, or to combinations of those groups. You can use demographic bidding whether you are using contextual or placement targeting and with both CPC and CPM bidding. You can refine your reach based on users’ gender and age on certain sites in the Google content network such as MySpace and Friendster, whose users provide that information about themselves. AdWords receives the data in anonymous and aggregate form from participating partner sites, which means that users can’t be personally identified.

This is all very good for advertisers and should help you increase your conversions since you can target a specific audience now.  You will have to assume that the data which is collected from participating partner sites is accurate which I tend to doubt but you have to test it to see how it works out.

Google has recently announced that it will now take into effect the page load time when scoring a landing page for quality.  There is no mention of how much it will effect the score but this is a good reason to look for a quality web host now.  If you are serious about being a web marketer, I would suggest not always going for the cheapest web host out there.

After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

I think it is an interesting move and a good one overall.  But it adds another dimension on running your campaigns now.