Last week, Google unveiled officially Ad Planner, a new Web measurement service geared to helping advertisers identify the best sites on which to buy ad space.
This new measurement tool, designed by Google to boost its online ad business, has been developed to improve the connection between advertisers and publishers. Planning executives will be able to introduce target audience demographics, as well as the sites that they visit most frequently, whether they are include or not in Google’s Content Network. They will then be able to use these data to create ad plans that are exportable via CSV. Although it is not yet possible to buy ad space with this tool, ad plans can be exported to a planning platform like DoubleClick’s MediaVisor.
Taking into account that the new tool is free, this could spell trouble for the industry’s key players. What is more, since Web measurement services mostly gather data on Internet by tracking what panels of people do online or by conducting surveys, the results are less consistent and complete than those of Ad Planner, whose measurements are chiefly based on data from Web servers.
