I’ve been wanting to try the new Google Ad Planner for some time now, since I have clients who utilize PPC advertising. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long after signing up for the beta before I was granted access to the service, so I have been able to put together this simple intro and basic how-to guide. If you have questions about this post or about Google Ad Planner or if you’d like for us to setup and maintain your media plan, I’d love to help you get started. Contact me today.

Google Ad Planner was designed as a free media planning tool as it relates to advertising. Large corporations and advertising agencies use media planning tools with detailed and sophisticated data to formulate plans for their clients. This new tool from Google ties in data from their search results, anonymous Google Analytics data and anonymous opt-in data from third party resources to give the same tools to small and medium businesses.

The first thing you’ll notice when you log into the Ad Planner is that you have two options. You cna either start researching or you can create a media plan. Since we’ll cover the researching phase as part of creating a media plan, I went ahead and started to put together a plan for a fictitious company, Good Guy Realtors. 

So the first step in the process is to name your media plan:

Click on ‘Create Media Plan’ and give it whatever name you’d like and click ‘Save’.

This will bring you back to the main screen. Next, you’ll perform some research, so go ahead and click on ‘Begin Research’.

You’ll be brought to a screen that several search options for you to choose from. In the sidebar of the page, you have filtering options including the ability to filter down to gender, age, education, household income and keywords. For instance, for Good Guy Realtors, I wanted to filter down to websites that had some element of real estate on it since I don’t want to waste my advertising dollars on anything outside of real estate.

Once I have the filters focused on the demographics that I want, I can then use the main pane of the screen to choose the websites that I want to focus on. In this section you’ll notice the following columns:

• Site name: This is usually the url of the website 
• Category: This is a generalization of the overall category of the website. Note: At first glance you might think that this has to relate to your desired criteria. This isn’t always the case. For example, Yahoo has a category of ‘Web Portals’ but they also focus on real estate, jobs, personals, music, shopping and more. 
• Comp Index (or composition index): This is the concentration of the audience relative to the entire country. Because you are filtering down by country (US by default). For example, say that you are looking for men ages 18-24. If you returned a comp index of 200, it would mean that you are twice as likely to find men between the ages of 18-24 on that site than you are elsewhere on the internet in that specific company.
• Reach: This is a number calculated by Ad Planner that tells you the estimated total percentage of internet users you can reach on this site that match your demographic.
• Unique Visitors: This number reflects the total number of visitors within your demographic on that website. This number changes with the changes in the demographic.
• Unique Visitors (Country): This reflects the estimated visitors within that desired country for the website.
• Pageviews: Total number of pageviews for that website within the last 30 days.
• Formats: If a website offers advertising through Google Adwords, then this column would show the types of ads that the website could display. Note: A website doesn’t have to participate in Adwords for you to get the benefit. For instance, many websites use a third party ad network or require you to contact them for ad rates. Hovering over an icon in this column will display a list of ad sizes available for that ad format.
• Imp/Day – This number reflects the total number of ad impressions per day on the participating website (if they display ads through Google Adwords)

Big news today from Adobe. They’ve announced that they are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo to enable the indexing of flash files (swf files). This effectively enables the visibility of content inside of flash files.

Nothing yet is known on how the content in flash websites will compete with other websites in the search results, but this is the first step.

Read the full story here.

For weeks now, Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox browser have been involved in a grassroots campaign to fulfill a goal. Their focus, was to set a record for the most downloads of a software in 24 hours. Marketing to the masses of users who utilize their software, Mozilla set the date for this past Tuesday afternoon and pulled the trigger. Aside from some early problems getting to the site due to the masses of people attempting to download the software, the event known by many as Download Day went off successfully. In fact, some eager users were posting the download link well in advance of the wide availability of the download page.

In the end, the folks at Mozilla did an impressive job promoting the event and surpassed even their own goals. They wrapped up the 24 hours with an impressive 8.3 million downloads of Firefox 3. Their original goal was 5 million. As of right now, they’ve reached 11.7 million downloads of the software. That’s impressive by any measure!

For those unfamiliar with the popular browser, Firefox is quite possibly the best browser out there. It’s faster, it can be improved upon with the addition of third-party plug-ins, skins and add-ons, because of it’s open-source nature, it can be utilized on a number of different operating systems and platforms including Mac and Linux distributions, and it creates a better browsing experience.

Here’s the link to the download page…

I just ran across a post on Search Engine Watch that does a great job of highlighting the different types of social media content. Since there is a little confusion with most businesses and consumers as to what is really classified as “social media” here’s a quick reference.

Wikipedia probably defines the term “social media” the best:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.

See often we mistake social media as just one thing or concept when it is really a whole lot more. Social media mainly thrives on the social interaction between users. A few years ago the most widely adapted concept was to add a forum or a chat to a website to enable the communication between users, giving the user control over some of the content that was added to a website as well as facilitating the social interaction between users.

More recently social media has been embodied in “social networks” like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, LinkedIn and more. The idea of creating connections between friends, co-workers, colleagues and more creating what’s been called the social graph. Social media is those networks and more.

I say more because it seems that almost all new websites that have launched in the last two and a half years have had some form of social media. Delicious exists to allow “social bookmarking”: a website bookmark list that is public and accessible to consumers and tracks the general trends and popularity between new stories, websites, blog posts and more.

In fact, a major push behind Web 2.0 is the idea of social media. Web 2.0 embraces the concept that the internet has matured into something that can be utilized as a platform. Social media takes center stage in embracing this new era by enabling user generated content or UGC. User generated content puts the user in control of the content that appears on a website rather than just one or two webmasters. This is the principal concept behind many of today’s popular social media websites.

In general, here are the types of social media as defined by Search Engine Watch:

1. News Content – Time sensitive events and news stories. Through the proliferation of social bookmarking websites and RSS syndication technology, news stories are distributed, blogged, bookmarked and rated in a rapid pace. Businesses looking to track and monitor the daily flow of information that can affect marketing and online business can use a service like online reputation monitoring to help manage their reputation based on this information online.
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content – This includes things that are aimed at attracting attention to something online. This category is most like to include “viral marketing” – where an ordinary video, blog post, or story can be proliferate through many thousands of people in a very short amount of time. YouTube videos are a perfect illustration of this category. Often people will blog, email or forward a link to a YouTube video they find entertaining or interesting making the video popularity increase immensely in a short amount of time.
3. Resource/Educational Content -You noticed that I pulled something from Wikipedia. If you’ve done a Google search researching information in the past, you’ve most likely come across this website. Wikipedia exists to give the consumer the ability to create the authoritative content on a topic. This type of social media is a perfect example of user generated content and social media.

Social media can seem like a complex topic, but it’s more than likely that in the past you’ve engaged in some form of social media. Whether it be commenting on a blog or news article, asking a question or responding on a forum, creating a social network account, or even just creating an online account to share pictures with your family. It all is considered social media!

Online video has had explosive growth in just the last two years. Just think, two years ago, the major tv networks didn’t offer online viewing of their prime-time shows, lifecasting was scarcely a term (justin.tv wasn’t around to show us just how great live online broadcasting could be), if you wanted to broadcast video there wasn’t much selection in services and you still had to pay a hefty price for the bandwidth, even YouTube didn’t offer much in the way of advertising (of course that was before Google bought them, too).

So with this explosive growth has come the consumers that watch the videos, bookmark them, rate them, comment on them and much more. This has given rise to the newer use of advertising in these videos. But there’s quite a selection in ad formats with online video. Emarketer.com published a story just yesterday that helped to summarize the formats and make understanding the concept just a little easier. Here’s the link to the article and here’s a link to the IAB, who created the guidelines to which these formats follow.

The graphic below summarizes the various ad formats and placements:

Also, in an upcoming post, I’ll outline several online video platforms that have a variety of uses, the features, pros, cons and my general opinion based on my experience with the service. It’ll be a very informative post… stay tuned!!!

Okay, I had to post this for all those who absolutely love shoes. It’s a new website called Shoetube. It just launched and focuses on those who love a good pair of shoes. Check out on the video below: