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I was doing a little online display ad targeting work for a client, and it occured to me that it might be worth adding a wee note on the blog about the tool I use.
If you decide that you want to try out some display advertising, you'll need to decide when you want your advert to display.

You can do this in the most basic sense by setting target keywords.  Google will then find sites that have content which matches those (with varying degrees of relevance that you decide upon) and display your ad there.

This can work fine as a broad sales strategy, and certainly has a use as a brand building and awareness raising technique, but if you want to make the most of your marketing budget and tightly define the sites on which your adverts display (and thus improve the qualification of the ad conversions to your site) you can use google's ad planner to understand which display advertising network sites match your target demographics, traffic levels and interests.

It's a massively flexible tool that allows you to search for sites that are relevant to your target market, break the site visitors down by age, gender, education, household income, geography and audience interests, build and then export your chosen  media plan direclty into adwords where you can then re-target existing ads, or to really capitalise - build new, custom ads based on your new market information.

It's a complex, fascinating insight into the statistics that google can pull for the 50%+ of the world's websites that have analytics installed, and allows you to target your marketing in a manner that will reduce wasted advertising spend to the bare minimum.

For more insight tools, try this.