Google's Campaign Planning Tools

Researching Sites with Ad Planner

Ad Planner is a media research and planning tool that helps you find websites your customers are likely to visit. Using a combination of geography, demographics, search keywords and commonly visited sites, you can define your target audience and discover where it's going online. This allows you to get a higher return on investment (ROI) through improved campaign targeting.

Three key benefits of using AdPlanner are:

1.Reach: Find enough sites that work for your campaign

2.Relevance: Ensure the sites you're targeting are appropriate to your audience

3.Insights: See where your audience is going online, beyond what you may already know

Using Ad Planner is simple. Once you've accessed the tool (google.com/adplanner), you will see 2 tabs: Research and Media Plan. The Research tab allows you to enter any website that you'd like more information about. You can also see statistics for popular websites for any given audience.

Within the Research tab, you can search for relevant sites to target in two ways:

•Search by Site: By entering the URL of any website you are interested in, Ad Planner will show you relevant statistics for that site such as unique visitors, pageviews, demographic composition, and related sites and keywords. For websites that accept advertising, you can also see information on ad formats and impression ranges available through AdWords.

•Search by Audience: Define the web usage behavior of your audience by keywords they search or sites they visit. Change "Ranking Method" to determine if you want to see the sites with largest number of users (Audience Reach), sites that have the highest percentage of your target audience (Composition Index), or sites that have both a high concentration of your audience and widespread reach (Best Match). Ad Planner will show the up to 250 sites visited by that audience, and various relevant statistics about each site. You can click on the sites that are most relevant to you and learn more about them, or save them in your Media Plan.

Once you have found the sites that you are interested in, you can save them to a media plan. The media plan will show you unique traffic and reach statistics for your plan. You can also look at the total demographic profile of the sites in your plan to ensure they will reach your desired audience.

Researching Themes with Wonder Wheel

The Wonder Wheel tool on Google can help you identify potential ad group themes for your display campaigns, as well as build keyword lists, by suggesting themes related to the queries you enter into the tool. You can then enter these suggestions into the Keyword Tool within AdWords to help you build your keyword lists. This makes the sometimes challenging task of coming up with tightly themed keyword lists far more manageable.

Creating several ad groups, each with only a few tightly themed keywords, is a common optimization best practice for contextually targeted display campaigns on the Google Display Network. This allows AdWords to target your ads more effectively on the most relevant content, leading to more clicks and conversions for your campaign. This also gives you insight into which themes are performing well for your campaign and which are not - allowing you to better allocate your advertising investment.

Finding Ad Group Themes: When you search for any topic on Google, Wonder Wheel will generate up to eight related topics for you to consider. Each topic represents a possible ad group theme for your campaign. Simply click on any of the topics to see other searches and themes related to it. This allows you to quickly build up a large set of campaign expansion options, in a visually intuitive way. Some of these topics might be completely irrelevant, but closely associated with your brand or theme. These are great candidates for your negative keyword lists.

Building Keyword Lists: Once you have finalized your ad group themes, enter each (one at a time) into the AdWords Keyword Tool, under the "Descriptive words or phrases" tab and select get keyword ideas. You can then select the most frequently searched keywords and save them to your ad group. You should typically limit the keywords you add to the top five to ten keywords that the Keyword Tool suggests. This will help to ensure that your list stays highly relevant to your ad group theme.