November Insights from DoubleClick Ad Planner

Insights abound in the latest global Ad Planner 1000 list for November 2010. This is a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick Ad Planner. Access the list here for more detailed information on each of the top 1,000 sites.

Perhaps not surprisingly with the holidays coming up in December, department store sites and retailers saw significant gains in unique visitors on the global list. Walmart.com went up a whopping 44% in November and other retailers saw significant gains as well kohls.com (+35%), jcpenny.com (+34%), target.com (+31%), sears.com (+31%) and macys.com (+20%).

Other categories, such as news, travel and hospitality didn’t fare so well. Here in the U.S. with the November elections you would think that sites such as the huffingtonpost.com (down 24%) would experience a big increase in the unique visitors from the previous month but that wasn’t the case. Apparently it was a slow news cycle in November, at least when it came to online news sites.

Other news-oriented sites that experienced notable declines in the number of site visitors in November include:

• aolnews.com (-32%)
• abcnews.go.com (-31%)
• nytimes.com (-27%)
• telegraph.co.uk (-26%)
• time.com (-25%)
• boston.com (-25%)
• usatoday.com (-24%)
• cbsnews.com (-18%)

We also observed that technology news sites, mashable.com (-33%) and techcrunch.com (-31%), lost almost a third of their site traffic from the month before.

Travel and hospitality sites also saw declines in the number of unique visitors to their sites during the month of November. Travel search sites priceline.com (-26%), orbitz.com (-25%), kayak.com (-24%) and booking.com (-20%) all saw significant decline from their October site traffic. Hotel sites marriott.com (-25%) and hilton.com (-19%) also saw their traffic fall from October to November as well as the hotel booking site, hotels.com (-23%).

If you want to dive into the data even deeper, we now publish 21 top 100 lists in 16 languages. Select your preferred language to access the latest top 100 country lists. We have top 100 lists for November for Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States.

These 21 lists are available in British English, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.

Expect to see more observations with your favorite sites when we publish our next monthly update with December's data.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Signal to Noise tunes into local and foreign markets with DoubleClick Ad Planner

San Francisco-based interactive agency, Signal to Noise, wasn’t quick to jump on the DoubleClick Ad Planner bandwagon when the product was first available in 2008. It took a little time but the agency’s media team found Ad Planner really useful to supplement its other media planning tools when it came to managing campaigns targeting specific U.S. cities, foreign countries and other languages.

A major online retailer asked Signal to Noise to expand their online display campaigns to Canada, including websites in French. But the agency had no access to media planning data outside of the U.S. unless they were willing to make an expensive upgrade to their existing services.

When Allen Stern, media director for Signal to Noise, took another look at Ad Planner, he was impressed. “When we started to expand into Canada and to do French language campaigns, I tried Ad Planner again, and I was very surprised; I thought it was great!” he says. “All of a sudden, Ad Planner became a great tool for us.”

Stern’s team used DoubleClick’s free online tool to identify likely sites in Canada for his client to place its ads, mostly banners in English and French. He used Ad Planner’s flexible features to search for sites in Canada, in the French-speaking province of Quebec, or simply by language.

“We identified sites and put a plan together. Ad Planner actually helped us allocate budgets. Those ads worked great and have continued to drive ROI,” says Stern. “So our client was very pleased, and we continue to deliver media plans for Canada.”

It was the same story when his agency needed to understand the media landscape
in France and Germany. Once again, Ad Planner helped Stern find and track
appropriate sites, and saved the agency thousands of dollars in subscription fees
for other tools.

And even though his team can’t read French or German, that’s not a problem; Ad
Planner can still delve into a site’s statistics and tell them—in English—whether it’s a good prospect to add to a campaign.

Read the full case study to learn more about Signal to Noise’s success with clients’ campaigns using DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager