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.

Interesting…

ComScore released numbers today on the top Ad Networks online. They found that in March, AOL was the top network reaching 9 out of 10 consumers online or 90.7%. Yahoo came in a close second with 85.3% and Google in third 80.9%. The AOL numbers also include Advertising.com.

Maybe I missed it, but where is Microsoft in all this? I don’t see adCenter in these numbers.

Also, this is interesting in light of AOL and Yahoo talking recently. We’ll see what happens with this one!

Updated: Center Networks is reporting that AOL announced today that they’ll also be managing the mobile and online ads for Verizon.

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!

I just ran across this shot my wonderful wife got of me on Easter. I love it so much, I think it might just be my new headshot!! By the way, if you need a new headshot for business, resume, etc, give Erin Hession a call. She does amazing work!

It was hypothesized not long ago that Yahoo would either have to accept and acquisition offer from Microsoft or embrace Google’s ad network to stay afloat and profitable. Last week, Yahoo pass again on Microsoft’s offer sending a stern letter in response. Today, Yahoo announced that they’re going to embrace Google and are performing a small test of their Adsense platform fulfilling what many deemed as inevitable. The test, although significant, is only expected to last two weeks and only incorporate 3% of Yahoo’s market.

Microsoft was quick to issue a response to the news saying that that if Yahoo were to offer Google ads, it would consolidate 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands.

For those currently advertising in search, it would create a single point in which to advertise on both major search portals and their individual services (Yahoo is currently the leader in online email users) cutting down on the need to advertise using two ad networks. The potential downside is that it does limit those advertisers who want to work with ad networks outside of Google. I can see both sides of the coin. Honestly, it’s a difficult pill to swallow for Yahoo, but necessary.

What do you think?

Google made a new post on their official blog today responding to Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo.

While Google has been patient in responding thus far (not wanting to show their colors early), they made quite a bold statement today by offering a position against the Microsoft offer saying “the openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible” and that “Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions”.

Google’s primary concern with the deal is that it could possibly undermine the openness and innovation that made the internet (and Google and Yahoo!) possible. With Microsoft’s current dominance in the PC market, the notable concern is great that they will seek to create a dominant force in online search. Past projections for a combined Microsoft and Yahoo search would put them at a 30% market share in online search. That creates a major contender for Google who serves half the online searches in the US.

This could also signal a very big anti-trust issue (although that is yet to be determined) with Google seeking a monopoly on searches in the US. A merger between Yahoo and Google would already create the largest host of emails and IM chats around.

Google even goes so far as to ask that “could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services?”

It’s a very good question and one that should be addressed as the offer progresses. I doubt, though, that Microsoft would be allowed to limit access to services using their software or email dominance.

I’d like to hear your opinions. Is the deal a positive move for online search and media? Or is it a move that could potentially cause more harm than good? Or is it too early to decide?

Here’s a copy of the post:

Yahoo! and the future of the Internet

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first — and should come first — as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.

Google released a new user interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch the other day (they prelaunched this very thing in early December, but this was a full release).  The design is reminiscent of the Facebook iPod/iPhone UI released last year. I’ve included a screenshot below.

An interesting tidbit I found when I was reading articles today. Aparently Google search results showed preference for more recent content Tuesday. The 1st was the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP and on the search results page, Google displayed results that were very recent, including some news items from featured on Digg.

The question we all want answered is: How will this affect search results in the future? For instance, in today’s search marketing world, sites rely on a number of factors to help them rank higher for keywords. One of these factors is the number of inbound links that a particular page on a website receives. If Google begins to shift their focus to more recent content, the factor of inbound links becomes a less important factor, if not irrelevant. (Although at least one person has suggested that Google could be calculating inbound links in real time rather than over time).

For right now, though, any immediate or recent results that appear in Google seem to be temporary in nature. That means, for now, inbound links and internal optimization is still the way to go.

A short while ago Ask.com released a new upgrade to their search engine that brings the emphasis, not just on text-based results, but on a net cast wide. Ask is one of the first search engines to integrate their results from Web, images, videos, news and more to create a more complete, comprehensive result set.

The premise is simple, if you’re searching, for example, for Abraham Lincoln (too simple, I know), they are going off the idea that while you may be searching for biographies of his life, you may be interested to see the archived photos of him, the varying news articles, reports, and vodcasts that incorporate information on his life. This gives a more complete picture of the topics surrounding your keyword.

So the question remains, does this signify a new era in search technologies?

In my opinion, it does and I’ll tell you why. The internet is becoming more complex with new media and new ways of presenting that media. For search engines like Google, they’ve been buying up companies and adding on technologies that help to index and incorporate that information, but until now the integration of those services has been limited.

Google, for example, would mainly just show text links to search results with the highest ranked content in the form of text. Often times you might find an image or a link to look at the image search in case that’s what you were looking for. Nowadays, Google is not only incorporating images into their search results, but also maps, business locations, images, and video. The seismic shift from the old way of returning serch results to the future is being heralded as Universal Search. In the future, expect Google and others to begin to shift their focus from what the norm is to a more comprehensive and integrated platform that returns more than the usual high-ranking results.

What does this mean for all of us marketers who have spent so much time getting used to the norm? It means that allong with Google and Ask, we, too, need to shift our focus from a traditional search marketing aim to begin to provide more uniue and creative content from images, to news, from blog posts to podcasts and video. Web 2.0 is calling and as marketers we need to shift to embrace that call. The future is no longer about traditional text-links and content, but now about the whole picture.