• PPC Hero, Tuesday, September 2, 2008 12:15 PM

Joe Kerschbaum compares Google's Ad Planner and the AdWords Placement Tool to see how they stack up when it comes to choosing which sites to target for PPC. The client used for the experiment sells personalized wedding gifts, favors and accessories, making the target audience of females on the hunt for wedding favors (for themselves or friends) pretty clear.

With Ad Planner, you enter demographic criteria like gender, age brackets and household income, and the tool spits out sites in new horizontal and vertical markets where your core audience also shops/browses. In this case, Kerschbaum's first set of results directed him to sites like pregnancy-info.net, mothering.com and babyzone.com. "While I do believe that my audience probably visits these sites, I am afraid the intent of these sites is too far removed from the products my client has to offer," he says.

Ad Planner does allow you to enter your target site as well as the URL of a competitor, and once Kerschbaum tried that, he got the list of wedding-oriented sites he was after. And while the baby/parenting sites may represent an untapped source of traffic and conversions, he'd have to test them first.

As for the AdWords Placement Tool, you can target by demographic or topic. As with Ad Planner, the demographic search yielded a host of random sites--though these were much less focused--like indiafm.com, collegerecruiter.com and clipartheaven.com. Once Kerschbaum tried topic-based search (for keywords like "wedding gifts") he got a roster of wedding-related sites.

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