The first new feature is the ability to retrieve information about a domain or website. All that is needed to retrieve the information is to enter one or multiple domain names separated by comma in the Google Trends search form. Google will then display a graph detailing the popularity of the domain name over time.

There will also be information about the top 10 countries or regions that visited the domain or website, related websites and additional popular search terms the visitors searched for.

Google provides a link to the Google Ad Planner service which contains additional information about each website. This includes traffic estimates, popular keywords, advertising opportunities and ad specifications. It has to be noted that the values are estimates and not the real values of the website or domain. Webmasters who take a look at their own website will notice this immediately.

The second new feature is called Google Insights for Search which makes it possible to retrieve search trends for very specific queries. It is for example possible to get country specific top searches, compare related terms in a specific region in a country (e.g. laptops vs. netbooks vs. notebooks) or to find out when searches for a specific search term are the highest (to find out the period of the year with the highest demand).

These two new options of Google Trends can help researchers and marketers (but also interested users) in many situations from exploring new markets to discovering new product trends.

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One of them was the non-existing option to pick site categories and provide information to potential advertisers. Google now has introduced the Google Ad Planner which changes this slightly. The service seems to be in a testing phase with webmasters being invited by email. Every website that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools can be added to Google Ad Planner which then offers a basic interface to add information about the website.

This includes a small 250 character description, the selection of an advertising url directly on the website, up to five categories that describe the website’s contents (Computer & Electronics category alone has dozens of subcategories to choose from, the accepted advertising forms and the option to share Google Analytics data with Google Ad Planner (only unique visitors and pageviews which are estimated by Ad Planner).

It is obviously to early to tell if these information will make any difference at all as they only seem to affect so called placement ads on a website. Placement ads are ads that are placed by Adwords customers directly on the website. This stands in contrast to contextual ads that are placed globally on websites. Contextual ads usually make up the bulk of ad placements on a website whereas placement ads pay better.

Interested webmasters can take a look at how their website is displayed by visiting the Google Publisher Center.

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