Discover Who Your Audience Is

How well do you know your audience? Many advertisers think they know their audience well, but unfortunately, some do not utilize all the resources that would help them know their audience even better.
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist with Google, explains how tools such as Google Ad Planner and Google Insights for Search provide data that help advertisers truly understand the demographics of their audience. These tools essentially allow users to build a target audience profile based on actual data and analytics.
Avinash says, “The reality is, you can focus by using data.”
He went on to say that he has found that many advertisers only have opinions on their audience but neglect to run experiments and tests to validate their views. Although experiments and tests take time, they save advertisers from targeting the wrong audience.
Is your advertising campaign working? Can you prove your target audience with data? If not, you may need to re-evaluate and make sure you truly know who you are targeting.

Google Details Latest Analytics Announcements

Because Google Analytics has made several announcements recently, WebProNews caught up with Paul Botto, Head of Analytics Sales at Google, to catch us up on the latest news with GA. In this video from PubCon South, Paul explains Advanced Segmentation, the Google Analytics Individual Qualification Program, and Event Tracking.

First of all, Advanced Segmentation allows users to segment their visitors according to the specific demographics they want to know. Users can compare segments and key performance metrics side-by-side. It gives a better understanding of your traffic and visitors and could let you know areas that need to be improved.

Just two weeks ago, Google Analytics launched their new skills qualification program, Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ). Google offers an online course that includes Web analytics techniques and GA implementation, administration, and analysis tools. The qualification does require a small fee, but it reflects the knowledge of the analytics user and as Paul mentions, serves also as a resume builder.

The announcement that Paul is most excited about and that directly impacts sites such as our WebProNews Videos site is Event Tracking. Although Event Tracking isn’t completely new to GA, Google has made recent updates to it since its initial release.

As the Internet has evolved, Paul says it is more interactive and provides a movie-like experience. Tracking this performance is more challenging than tracking a typical page-by-page experience.

Event Tracking comes into play here since it allows users to track what is actually taking place on the site. It shows what objects (such as a video on our site) visitors are using, what actions (play, stop, rewind, etc.) they are taking on the objects, and what labels (headlines or titles) they are using the most.

For more information on all these announcements, check out the Google Analytics Blog.

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