While I promised myself I would never again be a beta user for another start up product (Skype 4.0 is just painful) the opportunity to use Google Ad Planner was just too good to be true. Google’s latest application presents site demographics of websites so people can plan targeted online advertising.

A friend in Vancouver put me onto it and it’s safe to say that when this application connects with NZ demographics it will become a very useful tool.

Using Google Ad Planner I thought it’d be interesting to sort New Zealand’s top 10 sites by unique visitors and compare it with some other analytic services.

Seeing the sites compared like this I think of Benjamin Disraeli’s “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” quote. Trade me are the only site who could look at all three measures without complaining. All the data is processed through different parameters so it’s hard to say one’s right or wrong.

Google’s data is missing a date and is presented as a collection of “New Zealand” sites which removes the international players like YouTube, Facebook and Bebo. They also conveniently leave out MSN and Yahoo!

And Nielsen’s data is collated from their members so most global players are missing. Nielsen often negate this issue in their PR by making industry or session time comparisons which does a nice job for forming the basis of a 300 word article in the technology section of national newspapers.

Alexa is a slightly different proposition with their data coming in from people who’ve downloaded their toolbar along with a mix of other ambiguous measures which are loosely explained on their site.

So which one’s right? It’s hard to tell but Google is the one that stands out for me. Google Ad Planner combined with Analytics and Trends are an excellent suite of products and their wealth of data is unmatched. If they can accept Yahoo exists and get their channels and geo-targeting sorted I’m sure they’ll be the best comparator down the track.