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.

Breaking News: Matt Cutts Explains “Canonical Tag” from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced today a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content. The three major search engines came together to allow users to point out their preferred version of a url. As Matt Cutts explains in this video, this format offers users more control.

Duplicate content has been a challenging issue for a long time. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site, could end up with several urls for each page making it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:

Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls.

The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all urls will be directed to the one preferred url.

For more information, each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Also, be sure to look for the rest of our video interview with Matt Cutts that includes his take on Google penalizing Google Japan, top security issues for 2009, and Google’s continued efforts with personalized search. The extended version will be available very soon.

To place this video on your web site, copy/paste
the following code into your HTML file:

More WebProNews Videos

Up Close with YouTube at SMX West 2009

We spoke with Matt Liu, the YouTube Product Manager at Google who had some interesting things to say about the popular video site. He presented at the “Up Close with YouTube” session at SMX West, and shared a little more with us separately.

He talks about ways that content partners, advertisers, and every day users can take advantage of YouTube. He discussed optimizing titles, descriptions, and tags for videos, and mentions YouTube’s paid service.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so it stands to reason that rankings play a factor in YouTube just like they would with Google Search. Matt breaks it down into 2 main buckets:

Basic stuff like making sure your titles, descriptions, and tags are consistent, using complete sentences when appropriate, adding the location and date of your video, etc.

Analytics - Once you get some viewership on the video, use YouTube’s analytics tool YouTube Insight to see who’s watching your video. Are your views coming from a certain audience? A certain geography? Find the video’s hot spots. You can figure out search terms from the analytics data.

He then talks in more detail about YouTube Insight, which he compares to Google Analytics but specifically for video.

More WebProNews Videos