'Net Features : demographics

Social Media Users are Young(ish) & Female

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Well, who would have thought? According to a Pew Research survey from late 2012, young adults are more likely than any other age group to use major social media platforms.

According to Pew's survey, 67% of all Internet users indicate they are on social networking sites. Where it gets interesting, however, is in the network-by-network breakdown.

Facebook: 67% of users are on Facebook; the service is especially appealing to women, adults aged 18-29.
Twitter: Only 16% of respondents indicated they were users; the platform is especially appealing to adults ages 18-29, African-Americans, urban residents.
Pinterest: 15% of Internet users, claim to use the platform; especially appealing to women, adults under 50, whites, those with some college education.
Instagram: Just 13% of Internet users are on Instagram; especially appealing to adults ages 18-29, African-Americans, Latinos, women, and urban residents.
Tumblr: Only 6% of Internet users are on the network; appealing to adults ages 18-29.

On the whole though, the chart from Pew below indicates that social network usage trends more female, white (non-Hispanic), young, somewhat educated, and urban.

Examining Affluent Males’ Web Preferences & Behaviors

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:53:00 GMT

Knowing your audience is one of the fundamentals of success in digital marketing – or any marketing, for that matter. And while their reputation may be battered and bruised in the wake of the 1 percent ruckus, marketers consistently and continually want access to one group in particular – affluent males.

A recent study by search marketing agency iProspect reveals some interesting information about this key demographic. According to the research, there are 19 million affluent men on the Web – defined as over the age of 18 with a household income of at least $100,000 – and they are researching, shopping and spending more than ever.

Highlights from iProspect’s “The Affluent Male: What His Online Behavior Can Teach Luxury Brand Marketers” study include:

- 40 percent are shopping online at least twice a week, and those shopping multiple times are spending over $30K annually.

- The vast majority of affluent males (91 percent) access a PC at least once daily while 77 percent have a smartphone and 50 percent have a tablet.

“The old adage that men hate to shop is being upended by the digital experience. Not only are affluent men shopping online more, but this demographic is doing extensive research, shopping and then purchasing online, which provides advertisers with multiple touch points to reach him. Understanding the habits of the high-end consumer allows iProspect to help our clients develop well-integrated digital campaigns that connect with this audience and deliver results," says Robert Murray, global chief executive officer, iProspect.

It is this group’s advertising preferences that are likely of the most interest, however. In terms of visibility, 71 percent of affluent males have seen ads on a PC while just one in three have seen them on mobile phones or tablets. On the whole, however, affluent males are more engaged with search than the general public. In fact, 96 percent used search to learn more about products, so it should come as no surprise that search ads, especially for mobile devices, remain top-of-mind for marketers looking to increase engagement with this audience.

“By all indications, this segment has untapped purchasing power which can and will trickle down to non-luxury brands,” says Murray. “The best digital marketing strategies integrate practices across all channels. For brand managers, knowing how to effectively communicate to affluent men will be a key factor to success in an increasingly digital world.”

Partnership Launches IP Audience Zone Targeting

Michael Garrity — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 01:15:00 GMT

Every year, the online retail industry sees considerable growth during the holiday shopping season over the previous year, making Digital Element's new parnership with Semcasting to launch a new privacy-sensitive online marketing tool great for e-tailers.

The goal of this new tool is to target potential consumers in their "digital neighborhoods," the most important places to reach online shoppers.

Digital Element is a leading provider of geolocation and IP Intelligence technology. Their pairing with Semcasting will provide its IP-to-ZIP code targeting technology with Semcasting's IP Audience Zone Targeting solution, a technology that automatically scores and categorizes online traffic into user demographic segments, allowing for secure and full qualified audience coverge.

This melding of technologies will go beyond the estimated 35 percent of consumers targeted by cookies.

"Instead of relying on an increasingly limited base of cookied users, IP Audience Zone Targeting allows retailers to personalize the website experience using an advanced, privacy-sensitive, and demographically appropriate targeting process," says Semcasting CEO Ray Kingman, "Our solution classifies - in real time - anonymous web visitors in order to automatically provide personalized content and targeted promotions specific to digital neighborhoods across America, based on user type and demographic profiles."

IP Audience Zone will be able to identify a Web user's location down to their ZIP code by using a multi-step analytical process that incorporates Digital Element's NetAcuity Edge technology. After that, they will segment the ZIP codes by audience type and assign the demographics associated with them as sub-ZIP code micro areas for precise digital targeting.

Semcasting's IP Audience Zone gets its data from the premiere directing marketing database containing information on over 227 million individuals and more than 126 million households. They then map that to the U.S. Internet using IP addresses.

With retail e-commerce expected to grow by approximately 13.7 percent in 2011, for sales in excess of $188 billion, this solution can help retailers enhance reach and frequency, while enriching the analytics of digital campaigns through the targeting of website visitors based on the demographic and psychographic data used in other advertising mediums.

Userlytics Targeting More Relevant Demographics

Michael Garrity — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:00:00 GMT

The interactive testing solution used by video-based in-home marketing and advertising customer research service Userlytics just got a whole lot better for marketers, brands and businesses.

Userlytics' core offering, a solution that allows agencies and brands to qualitatively test and refine their marketing campaigns and creative with relevant audiences worldwide, will be receiving a pretty significant upgrade that will include a comprehensive new suite of demographic targeting capabilities.

The company claims that these new abilities will provide a level of granularity to the participant recruitment process that was not possible before.

While before testers could only be selected based on limited criteria like country, gender, age, education, employment status and family status, Userlytics clients can now filter through a variety of new, user-specific demographics at no additional charges.

The new demographics that can be studied by Userlytics include: salary/household income, cellular phone/tablet usage (e.g. iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad), service subscriptions (e.g. cable, Netflix, DirecTV), electronic devices (e.g. TVs, cameras, printers) and service providers (e.g. Comcast, Verizon, Sprint).

Along with the launch of these new demographics, Userlytics is also going to be launching new targeting filters that will allow companies to recruit test participants at any level of demographic attribute specification and located anywhere in the world, which can be done at a fraction of the cost and time required by traditional research methodologies.

Do you use Userlytics to study your video-based marketing strategies? Do you think that these new changes will be useful or beneficial to your business or brand?

Flurry's Web Analytics Tool Gets Update

Michael Garrity — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 09:00:00 GMT

Mobile analytics and monetization platform Flurry released a new version of it's free Web Analytics tool.

This new update (version 3.0) will focus on audience segmentation, giving site analysts the ability to segment their audience based on usage behavior. For example, audiences can now be broken down into paying and non-paying customers or light and heavy users.

They will also be able to estimate demographic data, like age or gender, for any application using their service.

Flurry has also included new mechanisms that will allow analysts to test how long viewers stay on a website.

According to Flurry, their analytics tools are currently in apps that reach 300 million monthly unique users and tracking approximately 6 billion transactions every day.

Yahoo! Ads; Scheduling, Demographics, Better GEO

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Not to be outdone by Google's foray into behavioral advertising, Yahoo! too is now enabling advertisers to target audiences with a lot more control with demographic targeting, ad scheduling (dayparting) and enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting at both the ad group level and the campaign level.

Yahoo!'s demographic targeting uses a concept called bid adjustments, which let advertisers set a premium bid for the categories that are worth more to you without losing other traffic volume.

The new ad scheduling feature (not sure why this wasn't available before) enables advertisers to schedule ads to be shown according to users’ time zones or according to the advertiser's time zone (an excellent feature if you have call center hours you must adhere to). Ad scheduling works in both Sponsored Search and Content Match.

The enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting gives advertisers the ability to mix and match geo-targeting setting at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. A dynamic mapping feature will let advertisers select individual ZIP codes and the ZIP codes surrounding them.

__________

What's One Great Idea Worth?
Upgrade to a professional-level membership from Website Magazine and find out!

Social Media: It's a Small World After All

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:36:00 GMT

New browser-based 3d virtual world SmallWorlds has launched, aiming at the +13 year old demographic. Mark Szulc of Adobe called SmallWorlds "the best online interactive experience currently on the web." That's a bold statement considering the trouble that virtual worlds have had breaking through into the general market, much less ones whose audience do not have a lot of buying power (although arguably are influential).

The beauty of SmallWorlds is that it is browser-based and not a downloadable application like SecondLife. Running in almost any web browser on virtually all mainstream Operating Systems, SmallWorlds is instantly accessible to the estimated 98% of people who already have the Adobe Flash Player installed on their computer.

Google Testing Demographic AdWords Bidding

Mike Phillips — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:55:00 GMT

Google is ushering in a new era of targeted advertising for the masses, demographic bidding for AdWords users. With the new system, ads can be targeted to only reach certain age groups or specifically men or women, for example. Naturally, certain groups can also be excluded. In addition, you can set your bids higher for certain demographics to make sure your ads appear to the selected group.

Here's how it works: Certain partnerships exist with Google to provide demographic data based on user settings, from sites like social networks. These networks turn over information (said to be non-identifiable) such as age and gender. So, if you have a MySpace account, and you have agreed to the terms and conditions at sign-up, Google has your information and will use it to target ads based on your initial settings. Because of privacy issues, targeting the 18 and under demographic is not available. Some of the sites listed by Google that are available for demographic targeting include MySpace, Friendster, HotOrNot, BlackPlanet and PlentyOfFish.

Bidding is available for both keyword-targeted and placement-targeted campaigns. According to the official AdWords blog, "beta test signups will be accepted soon." And it will essentially work like this:

Sign up to create your first campaign
Run a demographic report, after campaign is active for one week to test its performance.
Modify your campaign based on performance data to better target high-return groups and exclude other segments.

Welcome news all-around. This will give further customization to advertisers and better ads to consumers resulting in, theoretically, better conversions. It also makes you wonder if its time you start collecting some demographic data from your own website visitors and users.