Like it or not, Google knows a lot about you. They offered a glimpse of it on Friday with the launch of Google Trends for Web Sites, and tomorrow they’ll unveil a lot more, with an opportunity to open up a big new revenue stream in the process. The company is set to launch Google Ad Planner, a product for targeting specific demographics with ads on third-party web sites. According to Miguel Helft of The New York Times:
“While it uses audience measurement data, AdPlanner also combines it with search engine data and information from third parties, to determine with more precision what sites attract a certain demographic audience. It then uses that data to help agencies determine where to place ads.
If a media buyer has been successful with ads that ran on WebMD, for example, AdPlanner might be able to easily identify other sites where that media buyer will find similar success because they attract a similar audience”
How might Google offer such precise targeting? See the “also visited” list for any web site in the new Trends feature and you get the idea. As the dominant search engine by a wide margin, Google is in a far better position than any of its competitors to offer this type of targeting. And, for the moment, it’s all based on anonymous data.
Presumably, Ad Planner will offer AdWords integration so that advertisers can both see the data and then buy ads based on it. We’ll learn more tomorrow, when Google is expected to officially announce the product.
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