Google Tools & Technologies for Understanding Audiences

Background: Google Tools & Technologies to Understand Audience Behavior in Health Marketing 

Program background: In this poster session, we will explain the results of using Google tools such as Google Consumer Surveys, YouTube Analytics, and Google Brand & Search Lift to better understand audience behavior during health marketing campaigns, ultimately showing how these tools have given insight to audience awareness, audience recall and audience consideration and action of these campaigns.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Using Google Consumer Surveys, YouTube Analytics, and Google Brand Lift and Search Lift to better understand audience behavior on health marketing campaigns, and what drives behavior change.  Google Consumer Surveys is a market research tool that allows researchers to easily create online surveys in order to help make more informed marketing decisions, getting a better understanding of audience beliefs, values, and preferences across design, marketing, communications and advertising.  We will show how Google Consumer Surveys helped us better understand parent attitudes and beliefs around the HPV vaccine, as well as understand what audiences are planning to get a flu vaccine during 2015 flu season. YouTube Analytics has also helped us better understand what audiences are doing when they visit health and government brand channels on YouTube. For instance, using YouTube Analytics, we can better understand performance metrics such as views, and engagement metrics such as audience retention, watch time and subscribers. We will analyze CDC's brand channel, one of the strongest in the government sector with more than 500 million views, and showcase how CDC attracts viewers, and engages them with content, and through that engagement better understands how to change health outcomes. Google Brand Lift and Search Lift provide insights into how health marketing campaigns are resonating while in market. Brand Lift is a tool that measures ad recall and awareness while campaigns are in market. Search lift provides a better understanding of how digital campaigns drive search behavior, which can be a proxy for real world behavior.  If one is searching for a hotel in Barcelona, it is likely that they are taking trip there.  And thus, if someone is searching for information about quitting smoking, it is likely they are looking to quit. We will exlpre how Brand Lift and Search Lift have informed government campaigns, providing insight into digital campaigns correlating to offline behaviors.

Conclusions: These simple tools and technologies are ways that digital communications can be measured to better understand audiences and how they are taking action.

Implications for research and/or practice: Digital communications can enhance campaigns, and help encourage audiences to take action. These tools will help marketers better understand their audiences and measure the success of the campaign.