Today I received an invite to Google Ad Planner. As I was playing around with this new tool, I was really blown away by how much information Google has collected on specific websites. So much so that I wanted to share this tool with my readers, but I couldn’t come up with an interesting way to demonstrate the capabilities. Until I started looking up some of my favorite bloggers and saw the almost embarrassing balance between females and males.
So today I am going to analyze
with Google Ad Planner, to find out who is more popular with the ladies, Scott, Phil, Jeff, or Joel. I know this is one of those questions that has been hotly debated by nobody, but I thought it was a good mechanism to demonstrate what kind of information Google Ad Planner can show.
Please note that I wanted to also analyze, Rob Conery and Jon Galloway too, but their data was yielding results that I don’t think was accurate. Possibly because Google didn’t have enough information to classify them yet.
What is Google Ad Planner?
Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.
With Google Ad Planner, you can:
- Define audiences by demographics and interests.
- Search for websites relevant to your audience.
- Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
- Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
- Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.
Get to it already, which blogger is it?
According to Google Ad Planner, from least likable by the ladies to most likable by ladies… drum roll please… is…
3rd Place – Jeff Attwood
2nd Place – Joel Spolsky and Scott Hanselman
1st Place – Phil Haack
I am not sure how Google Calculates these metrics, but if I had to do an analysis, purely on speculation of why Phil Haack won. I would conclude the following:
- Phil has a very nice and ascetically pleasing website, where the other 3 candidates have more of a utilitarian design. (much like mine)
- Phil and Scott had pictures of them self on their frontpage and seemed to do better than Jeff and Joel who didn’t. By a pure numbers game, Jeff and Joel should have been leading the pack because, they had a broader reach, and thus higher page ranks.
- The last one, which I think is most important for attracting the ladies to your blog is: Phil was the only blogger to post a picture of himself with his son, on the front page.
Hope you enjoyed this preview of Google Ad Planner, it has some really nice analytical features that will help anybody doing a high level comparison of demographics for different websites.
Note: I didn’t include my self in this analysis, because Google Ad Planner didn’t actually have an info sheet compiled for coderjournal.com.
Google, Google Ad Planner, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman
Can you explain what was inaccurate about my data? It said the ladies love me, right? You just couldn’t believe that my charisma scores could be that high, could you?
Lies! Foul! I have a nice, aesthetically pleasing site! I have a picture of myself with my daughter on my site! I even post about sensitive, touchy-feely stuff!
Appeal! Appeal!
Hi Rob,
I have no doubt you would have ranked up there with Phil, and I do think you site is ascetically pleasing. But I think you had a couple of things going against you. Google hadn’t collected enough information, which was apparent by the lack of graph. I don’t know the reason for the lack of information, but the page said you had no female visitors, which I know just can’t be true.
Here is the info sheet in case you are curious.
http://www.coderjournal.com/uploads/2008/06/wekeroad-com-info-sheet.png
Hi Jon,
You were a different case, since Google only ranks the pages by their domain. You fell in with the rest of the ASP.NET Bloggers and forum at asp.net. http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/
Basically that is why I excluded both of you guys out. Nothing personal, I just couldn’t find accurate data.
And here I thought it was my incredible good looks. Also, my wife visits my blog, so maybe that skews the numbers up a bit.
I don’t understand why you say Phil won…
Jeff had approx. 17,000 female visitors (approx. 10% of 170,000) versus Phil’s approx. 6,250 (approx. 25% of 25,000) female visitors and Joel and Scott’s approx. 13,500 female visitors (approx. 15% of 90,000).
Ronnie
Ha – I must be *the* female demographic on Coding Horror. I’ll try and get some of my other girl programmer friends to check out Hanselman and the rest … oh wait, that’s right, I don’t know any other girl programmers …
(thanks for the Ad Planner demo btw)
I can’t imagine how you could attempt to discern the software blogger most popular among women without including coding heartthrob Justice Gray (http://graysmatter.codivation.com).
I’m an Atwood fan myself
LOL Sara,
I should do a follow up to this to see if Jeff’s numbers have improved any.