Google has released an update to their popular Ad Planner traffic model, to help media buyers improve their advertising campaigns. The updates include:
1. Altered ‘Unique Visitors’ to ‘Unique Visitors (users)’ so you can see the estimated numbers of real world visitors.
2. Added the ‘Unique Visitors (cookies)’ metric, which can help you cross-check and compare metrics like you can with Google Analytics’ unique visitor metrics.
3. Put Unique Visitors (cookies) and Unique Visitors (users) metrics on a site’s profile page allowing users to have a broader overview of how a specific site can support their media planning.
4. Added demographics for Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Switzerland, bringing the demographics total to ten countries.
5. Created Pre-defined Audiences (representing commonly used audiences). Users can now run experiments using various criteria without having to go through manual selection.
In the official Google AdWords blog, Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew member, reminded us that:
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. …our new model improves our traffic estimates. You’ll notice our page view estimates are now more accurate and consistent with web server measurements.
Hopefully this tool will continue to improve throughout 2009.
Tags: Ad Planner, AdWords, Analytics
