As a marketing professional who incorporates on-line as a major component of an integrated marketing strategy, two recently announced services from Google, Google Trends and Google Ad Planner, have already demonstrated great utility.
About a month ago, Google announced Google Trends. Google Trends gives media planners and buyers historical data for terms used in search. For me, this has already become an invaluable tool as I can better time my sports-centric campaigns and community development efforts around a particular sport based on when consumers are likely to be searching for that sport. Most recently at TeamZoneSports, I noticed the number of people searching for baseball and softball taper off. Google Trends reflected that characteristic as well as enlightened me to the fact that golf traffic peaks over the summer months and that football and soccer traffic start to increase July and sustain heavy search traffic through the fall months.
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| From Google Trends |
Three weeks ago Google announced Google Ad Planner. According to Google, Google Ad Planner, "is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.
With Google Ad Planner, you can:
- Define audiences by demographics and interests.
- Search for websites relevant to your audience.
- Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
- Create lists of websites where you'd like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
- Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan."
I've only just started to use Google Ad Planner as access is permitted only via invitation from Google. What I've seen so far shows great potential. Using the sports example reflected earlier, starting with baseball at mlb.com you are able to quickly drill down to see associated sites along with site traffic, demographics, sample search terms that would land you there, etc. then create a media plan that targets those sites that your prospects are most likely to visit.
For budget conscience marketing organizations, Google has assembled a suite of services that should be seriously considered. When you consolidate the functionality of Google Trends and Google Ad Planner with Google Adwords and Google Analytics, you are able to enjoy a comprehensive, rich media planning, implementation and analysis portfolio unrivaled in the market today. Granted there are point products/services available from other providers that offer deeper functionality, but when you consider the cost to use Google's media tools (i.e., free), that they tend to be easy to use, and are available from a single provider, you will be hard-pressed to find something elsewhere with the same value-added capabilities.
I'm anxious to see what new products or services Google delivers as they fuse recently-acquired Double-Click capabilities and other innovations into their total media offering.
Since timing and location of ads are critical dimensions to a successful marketing campaign, these two new services from Google add great value for taking on-line decisions. With them, Google continues to cement my confidence as my on-line end-to-end media partner.
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