Google Ad Planner is a pretty valuable tool for marketing agencies to help them know more about websites – you plug in the site name and Ad Planner will show you loads of useful data about that site.

Google has opened access to their Ad Planner to anyone with a Google account. This is news of note for any arts marketing manager or coordinator and might be worth a few minutes of exploration. Ad Planner is a tool that helps you identify Web sites that your target audience is visiting by aggregating tons of search and site visit data. You can narrow your focus by demographic (gender, age, household income, education), by geographic region (country, state, metro regions), or by sites or keywords searched. You can select target Web sites and create a "Media Plan" and explore that plan through aggregate demographic data and interactive charts.

How Google collects this data in the first place is a mystery to me and still subject to discussion, and the limitations of the data can be felt when trying to use Ad Planner to get really specific about your target audience. While playing around in Ad Planner, I found that attempting to drill down too much resulted in, well, no results. Trying to filter by keywords searched can be particularly problematic