If you are looking for more site information to help plan your display advertising campaigns and understand audiences on the web, Google Ad Planner can help. Our goal is to provide you with the most accurate site information for better planning and decision-making, and we're excited to kick off the new year with an improved traffic estimation model as well as several other features.

The new traffic estimation model should help reduce some of the confusion that often surrounds tracking the number of unique visitors to your site. When creating campaigns, many advertisers use media planning tools, including Ad Planner, to look at unique visitors based on estimates of real world users. However, publishers typically rely on web server logs or web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to measure unique visitors based on cookie counts. Discrepancies arise when these two types of unique visitors are compared. You can learn more about this topic by reading the IAB guidelines on Audience Measurement.

To address the various ways of measuring site traffic, we:

• Added Unique Visitors (cookies), a new cookie-based metric, to help you cross-check and compare metrics, similar to Google Analytics unique visitor metrics.
• Changed Unique Visitors to Unique Visitors (users) so it's clearer that you're reviewing estimated numbers of real world users.
• Placed the Unique Visitors (cookies) and Unique Visitors (users) metrics on a site's profile page so you'll have a more comprehensive view of how a specific site can support your media planning. Learn how to make the most of these two metrics.

In addition, our new model improves our traffic estimates. You'll notice our page view estimates are now more accurate and consistent with web server measurements.



We've also added country demographics for Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Switzerland, which brings our demographics total to ten countries, with more coming in the future. In select countries we've also added a new demographics category, Children in Household, which can be used to research sites.

You've told us that defining an audience to fit your intended customers can be difficult. In response, we've created Pre-defined Audiences that represent commonly used audiences. Now you can experiment with different criteria without having to choose them manually.

This release represents only a fraction of what we're planning for 2009. Stay tuned for more Google Ad Planner announcements soon.

[Note: this post has been reprinted from the Inside AdWords blog]

Since launching our display ad builder a few months back, we've updated you on several new features, such as our seasonal templates which are now available. We're focusing on building this product primarily for advertisers with limited display experience on our network but we'd also like to highlight ways in which agencies can use our tool to improve efficiency for their clients and themselves.

As has been our goal, our "long tail" of users are expanding their knowledge of effective text-based advertising into display: over 80 percent of active users of the display ad builder have never before used display ads on Google's content network. And of the other 20 percent, many are display "dabblers," having commissioned the production of a few display ads but never fully devoting much time or resources to the effort. Even of those with extensive display experience, very few work with agencies that provide creative services on a regular basis.

Although the primary users are these small- and medium-sized businesses, here are some ways that various types of agencies can use the display ad builder to their advantage:

• Use it to test early concepts and messaging. Try one of our templates to test out various calls to action, headlines, images, or color schemes. Gathering test campaign data, you'll have the insights to prove that the final creatives your teams produce have the highest impact. You can also use this data to help positively persuade clients who are on the fence about investing in a display campaign.
  
  
• Smaller agencies can use it as a mock-up tool for simple creatives. In just a few minutes, you can create a mock and grab a screenshot to show prospects the potential for display advertising.
  
  
• SEMs and interactive agencies without display creative teams can use the display ad builder to apply their knowledge about optimizing performance for text ads on Google's network to the creation of simple display ads that get results.

Hopefully we've helped you think about some new ways to use this tool, and we're looking forward to launching more features that make the display ad builder even more useful. As always, feel free to send us product feedback or any other thoughts.

Posted by Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager

If you have clients in the financial or credit markets, or just want to learn more about how consumers are thinking about and using credit cards today, join us for our upcoming webinar on Thursday, January 29 at 12pm EST/9am PST. Aaron Katz, Director, Financial Services for Compete, Inc. and Masha Korsunsky, Senior Industry Marketing Manager, Financial Services for Google will co-present. Learn more and register for the webinar on our registration page, and we hope you'll join us.

Posted by Jack Krawczyk, Industry Marketing Manager, Financial Services

Over the past few months, the Ad Planner team has released a number of new features that were based largely on user feedback. To continue improving Ad Planner, we invite you to take this brief survey on how you're using the tool today and what you'd like to see in the future.

To thank you for your time, complete responses that include contact information will be eligible to win 1 of 50 $50 gift certificates to the Google Store! You can find the official rules for the survey here, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Annie Hsu, Product Specialist

To get the most insight from your client's Analytics account, we recommend linking it to their AdWords account for a number of reasons: Once linked, you don't have to toggle between AdWords and Analytics accounts to compare data, you don't have to manually tag AdWords links, and if you have e-commerce tracking enabled you'll see revenue-per-click data within Analytics. And linking the two accounts is easy - just follow these steps.

Every year, Google releases a year-end Zeitgeist, showing the top searches across various categories to give insight into cultural trends and current events. For instance, which movie trailer generated the most searches in 2008? (Dark Knight) Which campaign buzzword got the most search volume on Google in the U.S.? (Joe the plumber)

Uncovering what people are searching for can be an interesting exercise as well as a powerful tool when used for your clients' AdWords campaigns. The Search-based Keyword Tool, which provides keyword ideas that are based on actual Google search queries and are matched to pages of your website, has a new feature, the keyword library, which allows you to see the top keywords across various categories. You can think of it as sort of an advertiser's Zeitgeist.

You can browse the results for different categories in the Search-based Keyword Tool here or by clicking on the link that reads "See top keywords across all categories" when you access the tool. Best of all, if you sign in to the tool with your client's AdWords login information, it will scan your client's site for popular and relevant keywords that aren't yet in their AdWords account. You'll be able to find new, relevant keywords that you aren't currently advertising on.

Give the tool a try, and if you have feedback for us (or just want to share your personal favorite movie trailer of 2008), let us know.

Posted by Lisa Coffey, Product Specialist

To wrap up our series on Quality Score and start off the new year, we've saved one of our favorite facts for last: