The Google AdWords blog announced new features for Google Ad Planner and AdWords content network today.
The big news is that Google publicly released a list of the top 1,000 sites by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. The list ranks sites based on category, unique visitors, reach and page views. Not only has Google come out with this list, but they are also allowing advertisers to specify that they only want their content ads to show on these top 1,000 sites.
To activate this filter in AdWords, go to your AdWords account and select “non Ad Planner 1000″ within the “category filters” section.
The top list lists facebook.com as the number one ranking site globally with 570,000,000,000 page views and 540,000,000 unique visitors. The list will be updated monthly and does not include adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites. Yes, Google removes some of their own sites.
Where does this data come from? Google explains it comes from “aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms.”
The other Ad Planner features released today include a way to export your Google Content Network Placements from Ad Planner to AdWords and you can now create lists within Ad Planner.
For more details, see the Google AdWords Blog.
Related Topics: Google: Ad Planner | Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords | Top News
For traffic measurement, Ad Planner primarily gathers data two ways. 1) Publisher using Google Analytics can opt-in their direct measured traffic statistics. 2) For sites that don’t opt-in data, Ad Planner estimates traffic using Google sample data, which comes from the sources mentioned in the article. Since we have direct measured and sample data, we’re able to build estimation models that triangulate between actual stats and estimated stats.
More info about Ad Planner methodology:
http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=175532
–Wayne
Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner