Kicking the Tires on Google's Ad Planner

Earlier this week, did a quick trial run of Google's new Ad Planner tool. Overall, I give it a two-thumbs up rating. First of all its free, and I love free stuff! Second, the interface seemed to me to be intuitive. Figuring out how to use the service was fairly simple (full disclosure, I did attend an Ad Planner webinar a week or so ago but still think I could have figured it out), I could easily create profiles and store reports.

Where Ad Planner seemed to fall short was in the breadth of sites currently included. The good news is this part can hopefully be improved over time, whereas if the interface were clunky it would not be as useful of a tool.

For example, we do a lots of local (Cleveland) media planning/buying so I was particularly interested in any sort of geo-targeting capabilities. While it was made clear geo-targeting is not a current option, I thought I could game the system by entering our largest local website - www.cleveland.com. Unfortunately its not included in the Ad Planner index.

Next I moved onto doing research for one of our larger, national clients in the home improvement/home design space. Our client currently does lots of advertising on HGTV so I immediately entered this as a site to benchmark against. Only problem, HGTV is not included in the index either. HGTV is one of the largest home design websites, if they aren't included it is going to be tough to create Ad Planner home design recommendations.

Anyone spent some time with Ad Planner, what are your thoughts? Got any suggestions on how to do inspired geo-targeting?