The Google Display Network (GDN) is the new umbrella name for what used to be called the Google Content Network. Having been seen by many to have saturated the commercial upside of search, Google has rebranded to make it clear that it has big growth plans for content, display, and graphical advertising options.

There’s lots of ways to go about adding a campaign to the GDN. These include:

Keyword based targeting
Site and page-specific targeting
Category based targeting
Audience targeting
Remarketing

And you can use a combination of these targeting tools to improve your targeting options. For example, if you only want to target people who have been on your website previously, who are into travel, and who are reading a travel article on the News site, then you can choose:

Remarketing with audience targeting, and then select keyword based category targeting.

The Google Ad Planner

Google also lets advertisers make use of their (previously agency focused) Double Click Ad Planner. With this tool you can identify sites where you can reach your audience.

To start with, research sites that you know your audience spends time on, or target them by location, interest, demographic or keyword search.

You can choose from pre-defined audiences that are commonly used by marketers. You can also make use of subdomain or ad placements to target by greater detail. You can also use the Ad Planner 1000 to find the largest sites on the web.

The tool is interactive which means that you can rank the sites according to the criteria. And with lists you can note the best sites and placements for use in the future.

You can also use the tool to plan non-Google campaigns by just filtering to those sites not in the GDN. And if you’re fixed on just one or more forms of creative – such as video – you can filter to just those too.

Once you’ve drilled down to just those sites that you’re interested in, you can then grab detailed information from the planner, including traffic stats, demographics and unique visitor metrics.

When you’ve found the sites that fit your criteria, you can add them to your media plan, and either export it straight into your Adwords account or download it as a CSV.

Here’s a video that takes you though the whole process:

That’s it

The Google Ad Planner is an effective tool to plan online campaigns both on and off the GDN. Take a look and let us know what you think.

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