Google Ad Planner is Early Christmas for Search Marketers

By Bryson Meunier, Natural Search Product Champion

I just received my Ad Planner access this morning and have had enough time to play around with the tool to realize this tool could help change the search marketing game as we know it. Not sure why more reviews of this tool haven’t mentioned the benefits to search marketers inherent in it, but these are two gifts it gives to every search marketer trying to drive more qualified traffic to their web sites:

Smarter Link Building – Black and gray hats may still be focusing on the little green bar, but to white hat link builders and successful search marketers, long-term qualified traffic is the name of the game. To that end, Google’s Ad Planner can help marketers prioritize their link strategy by selecting the communities most likely to bring a lot of targeted traffic quickly. The process for this is similar to how a media planner would go about it: identifying the demographic and search behavior of the site in question, and then finding sites with a similar demographic and search behavior to partner with in content creation and linking.

For example, a women’s shoe retailer looking to get into social media may want to target Facebook instead of Twitter, as Facebook skews almost 60% female, while Twitter is almost 60% male. Furthermore, Facebook has about 40 times more unique visitors in the US than Twitter, with 41 million unique visitors and 7.5 billion page views to Twitter’s 1.5 million unique visitors and 30 million page views.

Twitter may have momentum in the blogosphere, but in this case Google Ad Planner can help marketers make more informed decisions about where their social media or link building priorities lie.

Better Keyword Targeting – Even beginning writers and speakers understand that the way to connect with an audience is know who they are. With Ad Planner marketers can better understand the demographic of sites they may be advertising on, and revise their ad copy to reach the majority. For paid search this could mean changing the creative in a search or contextual ad to reflect the demographic and “keywords searched for” information in Google Ad Planner in order to increase the visibility and click through rate of the ad.

For SEO and paid search the tool is a competitive research tool of the highest order, allowing advertisers to see more information about their competitor sites than they ever could before, unless they subscribed to Hitwise or comScore for about $50k/year. This includes keywords that competitor sites appear for in Google, which could present additional keyword research opportunities.

There are more benefits to the tool, but these two are reason enough to add it to every search marketer’s process. Have you added it to yours yet? If not, apply for an invite here.