• Fortune, Thursday, June 26, 2008 11:17 AM

Editor's note: We've changed the name of the publication cited, which was incorrect.

Web audiences are splintering across untold numbers of long-tail sites, from social networks to blogs to obscure services, making it increasingly difficult for marketers to find large, targeted groups of individuals. The long tail has proven to be a tough nut for traffic measurement firms to crack because their audiences-while they may be finely targeted-are too small to count using panel based data.

Enter Google, and its new AdPlanner service, which aims to turn the art of finding the right audience into a science. The free online service lets media planners plug in the age, language, region or other characteristics of the people they want to reach, and then spits out a list of Web sites that attract those kinds of audiences. Services like Quantcast already use a similar plug-and-play approach, but the fact that Google, with its mountain of user data, is entering the field "could accelerate the digital transformation of advertising-and help the company burrow its way even deeper into Madison Avenue," writes Fortune.

For starters, Google has the broadest, most detailed audience on the Web from which to draw data from. After all, the company has spent billions on software and servers that track and save data about the activity of all of its billions of users. Google's massive data bank represents an approach that's markedly different from the decades-old methods of taking samples of huge audiences and analyzing their buying preferences. Google can simply go into its data pool and tell you exactly what people are buying and searching for online.

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