At first, it looks amazing. The data is easy to find, easy to sort and more comprehensive than what you will find from Comscore. As an internet marketer, I find myself performing extensive competitive
research and this tool makes it easy to not just find more competition but gives me site statistics about them.

If I am creditcardguide.com for example, and I do not know who my competition is, I can simply enter my own website in the Online Behavior section and I get results showing acclaimvisa.com, smartbalancetransfers.com and creditcard321.com.

I can then drill down on smartbalancetransfers to see their websites demographics (in the US only at the moment). This can be a great way to show your boss your websites market share or see how the competition stacks up.

This also works great for e-commerce sites to help you find which competitors or even complimentary sites are also running Google text ads for site placement targeting. When searching for thefind.com, a shopping portal, I see that shopwiki.com and bedbathstore.com display Google ads. If I were TheFind and looking to grab some more of the market share, I would target these sites.

Google Ad Planner is very useful in regards to research and planning, but it still isn’t perfect.

Initially, while looking to see what websites Ad Planner associates with www.seo-chicks.com the list looks pretty good. It was populated with the likes of Sphinn, Bruce Clay, SEOMOZ, and SEO Round Table. It also mentions Chris Hooley, but did you know that Chris Hooley is in the Alcoholic Beverages category? I know he likes to have a good time, but do you think this is a little extreme?

Drilling down for more information about SEO Chicks, I found out that all of the US visitors to the site are 35-44 year old men. Am I the only one a little creeped out by this?

Beta errors aside, there is a lot of potential with this product for both media buyers as well as paid search professionals looking to do some more advanced site targeting, but in its current state it is still missing some key features. In addition to displaying websites that do not accept advertising, Google Ad Planner can be sorted to show if it accepts Google image ads, Google text ads, or gadget ads.

This feature is great if you are looking for new sites to placement target your PPC campaign, but there is no way to ONLY display websites that accept certain formats of Google ads.

Also, once you build your media plan, there is no way to actually execute it inside the interface. If I just spent all the time finding sites to advertise on, I can’t do much with it because there is now way to integrate this with my Adwords account. I could manually add everything into my Adwords account, but Google should know this better than anyone – PLEASE make spending money easy!

Overall, if you can get on the beta list for this one, it is pretty cool and well worth it despite some miscategorization. When checking their stats on my own sites to verify accuracy, the pageviews, visitors and demographics were spot on, even for the sites that do not run Google Analytics. This does beg the question of where Google is getting this information from, but I am not going to ponder that too much, because if I do I will likely run screaming from the internet and go back to two tin cans and a string for communication and the Dewey Decimal system for research in fear that Google really is Skynet.

In SMX Advanced 2008

Lauren Vaccarello of lvlogic told WebProNews at SMX Advanced 2008 the rewards of offline conversion tracking, and knowing all about your incoming revenue, will make up for the work needed to set up that tracking.