State by State Web Usage Metrics Tool - How it can be Beneficial for Research Junkies

Chitika, the online advertising network has published a new interesting tool for all the research junkies. It is an interactive map which is categorized by the usage of operating systems as per the percentage by each state. In this, map allows users to check usage of operating systems like Mac, Windows, Linux and Google; across the United States, you just have to hover over each state to discover the percentage of use.

According to the data, we can see that there are more Americans, those are using Windows, especially in Washington, where it has the headquarter of Microsoft, with 98.3% record.







In the meantime, Google is most widely used in Utah (73%), Mac is most popular in Vermont (28.5%), and most of the Linux users are in Wyoming (8.7%).

Here if we take a general example, often marketers need to understand that at times to attain the target audience time and again you have to find out what operating system your customers or potential customers are using. Although this tool is just a handy tool which can be used to find out the vague percentage in the targeted area to know whether someone is a PC, Mac, or Linux person, in fact with the operating system you can find a lot about the personality of a person too. Like Windows users are for the masses, Mac users care a lot about chic and style and they are ready to pay for it, Linux users are deeply technical etc. just by looking at the operating system you can find out how to target them and what could be the strategy designs to attract them.

Now the point come, how accurate it is? How much we can rely on these results? So, if we look at Chitika Insights reports generated Chitika ad network after analyzing. The results through large sample sizes can be varied with network of publishers, so they can’t give any guarantees over these results. This is just a tool which find out the vague percentage to different operating system users. They claimed – “We can only measure what we see in our network”. Fair enough, therefore this tool is good for the vague analysis or just for the overview section.

What could be more fascinating if company can make such tools or solutions from which you are able to detect or identify your target audiences with some simple procedures and data feed in the system! If this can be done then companies would save plenty of time and money which they spent over market analysis and market surveys.

Nevertheless the data and capabilities of this tool is limited and it’s limited just for US and Canada only. However, Chitika claims that they are aiming to update these data points in every six months, with the next iteration of Google-by-state data coming in the next month or so. So just take a look and try to fiddle with with this tool, may be in near future it will make some good impressions when it comes to research and development part.

You can reach to that tool here

Google Plus: Right Platform to Start Blogging and Why?

Blogging is known as one of the oldest method of online marketing. It was the way to convey your thoughts and opinions to the people. When a person decides to start a blog, the first decision is to decide on which platform he/she want to start writing. There are plenty of decision making factors while choosing a platform i.e. on popularity basis, user reach and engagement, compatibility issues with browsers and social media platforms etc. In this, one of the important factors are user engagement and to what extend it is popular amongst the users because if no one know about that platform or if the platform is not known to people, it’s a mare waste of your time and energy while producing contents which do not have a reach to mass.
These days, Google+ is making quite an impact over the blogging segment. People had start considering Google+ not just for social media but for blogging too and it is because of the benefits and advantages it provide.

If we go back a little back in time (approximately 5 years ago); blogging was a public platform whereas social media was the private affair (Only profile connected people can access). But over the time of time, social media too become public and it allows you to access the public post even if you are not a part of community or in the list. This feature is used by the bloggers to promote their blog site.

Those days are gone when social media and blogging were two different things; now we have some platforms which provides both features in the single platform or you can say it’s a hybrid of social media and blogging. In this, Tumblr is a popular platform which allows both however, Tumblr is more for micro-blogging like Twitter but Twitter lacks in its word limits capacity. Here, who leads ahead is Google+. Google+ gave an amazing set of features like circle, hangout, communities, +1s etc. which provide unique benefits to the blogger which ultimately affects your organic ranking in the search engine.

YouTube Becomes The Number One Source in Mobile Data Traffic

Google-owned YouTube has reached another milestone in its meteoric rise to mobile supremacy. On Thursday, Sandvine – a provider of intelligent broadband network solutions – published its latest Internet traffic trends report, entitled “Global Internet Phenomena Report 1H2012.” The information presented is based on data from a selection of Sandvine’s 200-plus customers spanning North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Caribbean and Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

What report says:

• YouTube is the largest source of mobile video traffic in every region examined, accounting for as much as 25% of network data and no less than 12%.
  
• In North America, video and audio streaming make up more than half of mobile data traffic, led by YouTube, Pandora and Netflix.
  
• Mobile device usage on fixed networks: Home roaming accounts for 9% of total fixed traffic on North America’s household networks.
  
  
• Audio and video streaming will exceed 60% of North America’s mobile data by late 2014.
  
  
• Click-to-cloud smartphone photo back-up and synchronization will emerge as a significant source of traffic worldwide: the phenomena of the continuous cloud/client connection.

“Aggregate reports like our Global Internet Phenomena shed light on the Internet as a whole and inform operators on trends relevant to their business,” said Dave Caputo. “However, the real value for our customers is to take an internal census of data and trends on their own networks. Armed with detailed network data we work with our customers to develop tailored service offerings, traffic policies and usage plans.”

Facebook Test Button: Promote Content Directly from their Pages

Facebook will test a new “promote” button that makes it easier for pages to create Sponsored Stories directly from their posts, a company spokesperson tells us. The button will appear from the page publisher — the box from which page owners create posts — and on posts that have already gone live. The feature is aimed at small- to mid-sized businesses that are using Facebook for marketing, but don’t necessarily have the resources to work with a Facebook ad rep or third-party partner. The social network’s ad dashboard has become increasingly complicated with nontraditional ad types like Sponsored Stories and page post ads, but the promote button could make ad creation much simpler.

The promote button will let page owners pay to give their content additional exposure to their fans. If fans interact with the content, their friends might see that activity as a Sponsored Story, but there is not currently a way for page owners to create an ad targeting non-fans using the promote button. They will have to use the self-serve ad dashboard or the Ads API to do that. “Right now this is a very small test but we will continue to iterate on the feature based on feedback,” a spokesperson says.

Facebook has been gradually encouraging page owners to pay for distribution of their content, even among fans they formerly thought they could reach for free. As it turns out, the average page post only reaches 16 percent of fans, the company revealed in February. This is the result of users connecting to more people and pages, all of whom are generating more stories than ever before. Most people wouldn’t enjoy seeing every bit of their connections’ activity in News Feed, so Facebook uses EdgeRank to filter some stories out and highlight the ones that seem most relevant to each user. Last year the social network introduced a new type of ad that turned page posts into Sponsored Stories. That was the first time the company began to encourage businesses to spend money on engaging existing fans, in addition to running campaigns to acquire new ones. Then at the Facebook Marketing Conference earlier this year, the company revealed Reach Generator, a premium advertising solution to help large brands reach their fans through Sponsored Stories within the mobile and desktop feeds, as well as through sidebar ads. The promote button is a simple way to foster the same strategy among smaller businesses.

Google’s +1 button is the new PageRank?

Let me start off by being very clear. Google is not getting rid of PageRank in favor of the +1 button. Google is, however, looking at the data from the +1 button as a signal of content quality, and +1s will no doubt continue to be largely coveted by webmasters and content creators web-wide.

It’s been pretty clear since Google first announced the +1 button (even before they announced Google+) that the feature was designed to send Google signals for quality content. It was essentially billed as a way for web users to tell Google when a piece of content is good enough to be considered a good search result.

Wired is running a story now saying that Google has confirmed its plans of turning the button into “a crowdsourcing tool that helps re-order search results and fight web spam”.

“Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results,” a Google spokesperson is quoted as saying. “The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1’s and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.”

Of course it is unwise to place too much emphasis on just a single ranking signal. At least that’s what Google would have webmasters believe. They’re tossing around very similar language with regard to the +1 button ranking as they historically have when people worry about PageRank too much: “There are more than 200 signals that we use to determine the rank of a website, and last year we made more than 500 improvements to the algorithm.”

Just as you’ve seen plenty trying to boost their PageRank through black hat tactics, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that these same people will try to exploit the +1 button. A major weapon against this that Google has is its strict Google+ account name policy, which has been a bit controversial thus far.

It became clear in recent days that Google+ is all about identity as far as Google is concerned. Eric Schmidt drove this point home, as discussed here. While this makes sense for a variety of reasons (including the potential integration of Google+ with products like Google Wallet), it also makes a great deal of sense in that it shows Google exactly who is +1ing what, which should in turn help them enforce any policy (current or future) concerning abuse of the button for gaming search.

In terms of white hat tactics, you may do well to consider things like this research comScore just shared. +1′s now mean more sharing of content to the actual Google+ network – people’s circles, which should (in theory) translate to increased traffic from Google+ itself. So, it may help to know about the kinds of people who are using Google+, as opposed to Facebook, for example. comScore’s data looks at those searches containing the Google+ and Facebook brands. It’s probably not exact, but many of those searching for Google+ content are likely going to be users of the service.

“The most striking differences between Google+ searchers and Facebook searchers are in Age and Income level,” says Eli Goodman, who leads the business development team at comScore. “Google+ searchers overwhelmingly skew towards 18-34 year olds. Clearly Google+ is a popular brand with the younger segments, and good knowledge for Google to have as they develop their acquisition strategy and evolve their user base. Since Facebook is a much more mature brand in the social networking space, their search audience falls closely in line with the search population at large.”

“The income skews are even more distinct, essentially polar opposites of each other,” he adds. “More than 32% of Google+ searchers have a household income of $100K or greater, compared to 23% of Facebook searchers. Google+ is definitely off to a fast start in reaching the most desirable income segments, which may make it more attractive to advertisers.”