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Learn More About the People that Matter to Your Business with Facebook Audience Insights

 https://www.facebook.com/business/news/audience-insights

 The more customer insights you have, the better you’re equipped to deliver meaningful messages to people. That’s the thinking behind Facebook Audience Insights, a new tool designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior and more.

Say you want to raise awareness for your women’s luxury fashion brand, and you sell your products in-store. You’d want to know how many people on Facebook live near your stores, as well as their interests, their past purchase behavior and how they tend to shop (online vs. in-store). Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:

• Demographics — Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size
• Page likes — The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports
• Location and language — Where do people live, and what languages do they speak
• Facebook usage — How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on
• Purchases activity — Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)

And you can view this information for three different groups of people:

• People on Facebook (the general Facebook audience)
• People connected to your Page or event
• People in Custom Audiences you’ve already created (an audience made up of your current customers)

Audience Insights is different from Page Insights because it looks at trends about your current or potential customers across Facebook, whereas Page Insights looks at the interactions with your Page (i.e., likes, comments and shares).

We built Audience Insights with privacy in mind. It surfaces aggregated information people already express on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners — like Acxiom — through our partner categories targeting. Like Page Insights, Audience Insights shows information about groups of people without the need to share which individual people are in those groups. This allows marketers to view aggregate and anonymous insights while keeping people’s personal information private.

Audience Insights will begin rolling out today within Ads Manager for all US marketers. Global access will follow in the coming months. To get started, head tofacebook.com/ads/audience_insights.

Facebook Audience Insights gives marketers an overview of their potential audiences

Facebook introduced a way for brands to learn more about the audiences they are targeted with their ads on the social network in order to refine their strategies, and the new Audience Insights tool will begin rolling out to U.S. users of Ads Manager Thursday, with access outside of the U.S. to be added “in the coming months.” Audience Insights will offer brands aggregate and anonymous information on Facebook users, including:

• Demographics — age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role, and household size.
• Page likes — the top pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports.
• Location and language — where do people live, and what languages do they speak?
• Facebook usage — how frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook, and what device(s) they are using when they log on?
• Purchases activity — past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online).

The aggregate and anonymous information can be viewed for three different groups of people:

• People on Facebook (the general Facebook audience).
• People connected to brands’ pages or events.
• People in custom audiences brands have already created (audiences made up of current customers).

Facebook said in a post on its Facebook for Business page introducing Audience Insights:

The more customer insights you have, the better you’re equipped to deliver meaningful messages to people. That’s the thinking behind Facebook Audience Insights, a new tool designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more.

Say you want to raise awareness for your women’s luxury fashion brand, and you sell your products in-store. You’d want to know how many people on Facebook live near your stores, as well as their interests, their past purchase behavior, and how they tend to shop (online vs. in-store).

Audience Insights is different from Page Insights because it looks at trends about your current or potential customers across Facebook, whereas Page Insights looks at the interactions with your page (i.e., likes, comments, and shares).

We built Audience Insights with privacy in mind. It surfaces aggregated information people already express on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners — like Axciom – through our partner categories targeting. Like Page Insights, Audience Insights shows information about groups of people without the need to share which individual people are in those groups. This allows marketers to view aggregate and anonymous insights while keeping people’s personal information private.

Marketers on Facebook: Are you excited about the potential uses for Audience Insights?

5 Times Google Penalized Itself For Breaking Its Own SEO Rules

http://searchengineland.com/google-penalized-breaking-seo-rules-184098

Make no mistake. Plenty of sites — big brands included — willingly do things in an attempt to rank better on Google that go past SEO tactics that Google itself considers acceptable. However, there’s also no better poster child for how complicated and confusing Google’s rules can be than the fact that Google has had to punish itself with penalties over and over again.

Below, a look back on times when Google took action against itself. FYI, this is a companion piece to our related story on Marketing Land today: 10 Big Brands That Were Penalized By Google. Be sure to also check that out.

And now the list, counting backwards chronologically….

5) Chrome & Paid Links

One of Google’s big sins is when people buy links in hopes they’ll generate better Google rankings. However, Google found itself buying links as part of a campaign to promote its Chrome browser. The links were obtained as part of a video campaign that was run involving two different promotion companies.

The companies and Google made apologies all around, saying the links were more accidental than intentionally sought. No matter: Google decided however it happened, it was a violation that required the Google page for Chrome to be penalized. It was knocked out of the top rankings for searches on “Google Chrome” for two months.

• When: January 2012
• Violation: Paid links
• Penalty: Single page, the Google Chrome home page, had rankings lowered
• Penalty Period: 2 months

4) Beat That Quote & Acquiring A Problem

When Google acquired financial comparison service Beat That Quote, it also acquired a problem. SEOs and places like SEO Book were quickly buzzing that Beat That Quote had been buying links and doing other tactics against Google’s guidelines.

Google responded by penalizing Beat That Quote to the degree it no longer ranked for its own name. Two weeks later, the Beat That Quote penalty was lifted. Then the next day, it was applied again. How long it remained in place after that, at this point, seems undocumented.

• When: March 2011
• Violation: Paid links
• Penalty: Rankings degraded; no longer made first page for own name
• Penalty Period: 2 weeks, at first, then uncertain extension after that

3) Google AdWords & Cloaking

Google found itself violating its own rules against “cloaking” — showing its web crawlers something different than a human would see — for help pages relating to AdWords. When this was noticed, Google penalized the AdWords help pages so they no longer ranked well for searches on topics like “adwords help.”

Google didn’t, however, similarly penalize other Google help pages that were doing the same thing. How long the AdWords pages were penalized is unclear. I can’t find that anyone reported when they were back again.

• When: July 2010
• Violation: Cloaking
• Penalty: Rankings degraded
• Penalty Period: Unknown

2) Google Japan & Paid Links

Google got in trouble with itself when Google Japan admitted to buying links to help promote a Google widget. When the news emerged, Google’s search spam team reduced the PageRank score for Google Japan from PR9 to PR5.

PageRank is a value of importance that Google assigns to pages and one of many factors that influences if a page ranks well. But in this case, it really had little impact. People seeking Google Japan could still find it. After 11 months, the PageRank score rose to PR8, indicating the penalty seemed to be lifted.

• When: February 2009
• Violation: Paid links
• Penalty: PageRank dropped from PR9 to PR5
• Penalty Period: 11 months

1) Google AdWords & Cloaking (The Original)

Remember above, how Google penalized itself because of cloaking involving its AdWords help pages? That was actually the second time the AdWords support pages had been involved with cloaking. The first time was also the first time Google ever took action against itself.

Someone at Google had hidden content on the pages in a way meant to help those using Google’s own internal search tool. However, because those changes were seen by Google’s main search engine, that meant they were in violation of guidelines. After this was spotted and discussed, Google had the pages removed from its index. For how long, as this point, I can’t locate.

• When: March 2005
• Violation: Cloaking
• Penalty: Pages removed from Google
• Penalty Period: Unknown

Again, be sure to see our companion story on Marketing Land:

How A Single Guest Post May Have Gotten An Entire Site Penalized By Google

 http://searchengineland.com/guest-post-google-penalty-187707

Google made it clear earlier this year that those doing guest posts “for SEO purposes” might be subject to penalties. But the latest chapter in its war on guest posts feels a bit crazy: an entire site put into Google’s penalty box because of a single guest post that Google didn’t like.

Your Entire Site Has Been Penalized By Google

The situation involves DocSheldon.com, run by Doc Sheldon, a long-time SEO. Sheldon recently discovered that he’d been issued a penalty against his entire site, as he shared in an open letter to Google:

As you can see from the penalty report above, Google decided there were “unnatural links” from his site and applied a manual action that meant his entire site “may not perform as well in Google results.”

But Google Won’t Explain Exactly Why

So what were those links? As we wrote earlier this week, here’s another case of Google failing to keep its promise to provide more examples relating to penalties. Google doesn’t appear to have shown what any of these unnatural links are, in order to give Sheldon a clue about what the exact problem was that hurt his entire site.

Hence Sheldon’s open letter, which he tweeted at the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts (and which also got lots of discussion at Inbound.org). That got Cutts to reply with some specifics:

Cutts seemed to be referring to this page on Sheldon’s site, a guest post that was written in March 2013.

Condemned For A Single Link?

The post (which doesn’t appear to have changed since it first went up) contains two links at the end, within the author’s bio, one of them leading to his LinkedIn page:

The other link, as the arrow points to above, talks about where people can find a reliable source of “Hispanic data” which leads to a page that’s more a lead-generation pitch about big data as it applies to the Hispanic market rather than providing any direct, further information.

The SEO savvy person hypersensitive to any possible freak-out Google might have, will look at those words “Hispanic data” in the anchor text and get that Google might consider them too “keyword rich” and thus potentially suspicious. Such is the life of the SEO, condemned never to view the web as “normals” might, because as SEOs, they’re pretty aware that Google will hold them to a much higher standard than normals, if it ever takes a closer look at something.

So back to the tweet from Cutts. Apparently, he fired up some tool at Google to take a close look at Sheldon’s site, found this page relating to the penalty and felt that a guest post on Hispanic social networking wasn’t appropriate for a blog about SEO copywriting, as Sheldon’s site proclaims itself about in its tag line.

Convicted After-The-Fact

Therefore, this guest post is presumably something Google decided was done only for SEO purposes, rather than to educate Sheldon’s readers and thus was subject to Google’s new guidelines about guest posts that it established nine months AFTER this guest post went up.

Aside from the obvious disturbing action of Google in making up new rules and then imposing after-the-fact penalties, Sheldon’s site isn’t just about SEO copywriting. Let’s look at that tagline ourselves:

The site also covers “content strategy,” and arguably, best practices about Hispanic social networking can fall into that.

Google’s Going To Decide What Sites Are Off-Topic About?

More broadly, while it’s easy to dismiss all this as some type of SEO squawking, it should be pretty disturbing to any publisher that Google might fairly broadly decide just how narrow your site has to be, in order to escape a penalty, if you have guest authors it deems writing off-topic.

Nor is Sheldon’s site some hotbed of guest posts. When I was asked about this case during my Reddit AMA yesterday, I did some digging and found one other guest post. The link in that guest post also had some issues that threw up red flags. But two guest posts out of a site that contains nearly 300 pages seems excessive to condemn the entire site.

Indeed, as our 10 Big Brands That Were Penalized By Google, From Rap Genius To The BBC post from earlier this year explains, the BBC, Mozilla and Sprint all had penalties issued against them involving a single page of content on their sites. But unlike Sheldon, only those pages were penalized, not the entire site.

Yes, We Need Search Police — But Also Fair Search Police

I’d say this is jump-the-shark time when it comes to Google penalties except that Google jumped-the-shark with penalties ages ago. Yes, it has sometimes good reasons to police spam. Yes, going after guest blog networks that may exist with a primary reason to generate links for people rather than content may also make sense.

That’s what happened to MyBlogGuest, a penalty that continues to be a hotly debated in some SEO circles. I’ll just say that when Google said in January that it was going after guest blogging for SEO purposes (which means guest blogging for links), having a top-level pitch that using the network as a way to earn links was pretty dumb:

It’s like seeing the bull running at you and just standing there declaring that it shouldn’t. From what I gather, MyBlogGuest required publishers using guest posts to also provide direct links, not allowing nofollow to be used, with from what I also gather was an attitude that Google shouldn’t be able to tell anyone how they should regulate links.

I get that. I really do. Go read our What Is The Nofollow Tag; When & How To Use It article, and you can see my personal frustration with Google’s never-ending new rules about what are “good” links versus what are “bad” links. I’d also strongly encourage anyone — including those at Google — to go back and read these:

• Links: The Broken “Ballot Box” Used By Google & Bing
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

But links aren’t going away as a signal, as Google reaffirmed earlier this month. That also means Google’s likely to continue with the sometimes crazy rules it wants to apply to linking.

Some Suggestions

As a suggestion to all parties, I’d say:

• Google: Enough with the penalties and get into a model where if you don’t like a link, you don’t count it rather than issuing penalties
• SEOs & Publishers: Forget how you can build links, which is just too dangerous now. Think how you can build audience — and if links come as part of that, it’s side-benefit

As for Sheldon, the good news is that he tells me his penalty has now been removed, five days after it was imposed. That is good news. At most, it should have only applied to a single page.

Perhaps the entire debacle will cause Google to better deliver on its promise of more actionable reports, as well as take to heart that the entire penalty attitude needs some reform.

10 Big Brands That Were Penalized By Google, From Rap Genius To The BBC

http://marketingland.com/10-big-brands-that-were-penalized-by-google-69646

It’s been a busy year already with big brands getting hit by Google penalties. First came Rap Genius, slammed so hard that you couldn’t find it for its own name. Then came Expedia’s suspected penalty that may have hurt its traffic. But these are also a familiar tune. Big brand violates Google’s rules, gets in trouble but ultimately returns to Google’s good graces with what may seem a virtual wrist-slap.

Below, in reverse chronological order, is a list of major brands that have been hit by Google penalties over the years for various reasons. Some violations weren’t even intentional.

10) Rap Genius & Links For Tweets

Rap Genius invited bloggers to add links to its lyrics content, in exchange for Rap Genius then tweeting the posts from those bloggers. After this exchange came to light on Christmas Eve 2013, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts said Google would investigate Rap Genius.

On Christmas Day, Rap Genius was penalized by Google and no longer ranking in the top page of results for its own name. Rap Genius also lost traffic for lyrics-related searches. After working to remove “unnatural links,” Rap Genius had its penalty lifted by Google after 10 days.

• When: December 2013
• Violation: Unnatural links
• Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; didn’t rank for its own name
• Penalty Period: 10 days

9) Mozilla & UGC Spam

That’s right, Mozilla — which makes the popular open source Firefox browser — has been penalized by Google. But unlike with Rap Genius, it was an extremely specific situation — one single page of user-generated content that was considered too spammy to include.

The situation emerged after Mozilla received a manual action notice – i.e., a message from Google that some human spam reviewer decided something deserved the site getting a penalty.

Concerned about a message saying “Google has applied a manual spam action to your site,” Mozilla sought help in Google’s webmaster forums. Google quickly clarified that only one single page at Mozilla had been impacted. A similar Google penalty over UGC content happened to Sprint one month later. And somewhat related, all of Digg was dropped from Google briefly, after a mistake Google made that was meant only to impact a single page.

• When: April 2013
• Violation: UGC spam
• Penalty: Single page apparently degraded in rankings
• Penalty Period: N/A, because the page was removed

8) BBC & Mysterious “Unnatural Links”

Google penalized the respected British Broadcasting Corporation? It sure did. Similar to Mozilla, the penalty involved a single page, this time one deemed to have “unnatural links” pointing at it.

The situation came to light after the BBC received a manual action notice. Like Mozilla, the BBC sought help in Google’s webmaster forums, which lead to Google responding that the penalty impacted one article. It’s unclear how it was resolved, as the page impacted was never stated. Probably, the penalty was removed by Google in short order.

• When: March 2013
• Violation: Unnatural links
• Penalty: Single page apparently degraded in rankings
• Penalty Period: Unknown

7) Interflora & Advertorial Links?

Similar to Rap Genius, Interflora found itself penalized in Google, no longer ranking for its own name, as well as for many generic flower-related searches. Why? Google itself never gave an official reason for penalizing Interflora, as is fairly normal in penalty cases, nor did Interflora itself say.

However, Google quickly pushed a warning against “advertorial” content that doesn’t make use of nofollow or other methods so that links in such content don’t pass along ranking credit. After apparently getting some links removed, Interflora’s penalty was lifted after 11 days. Interestingly, Google didn’t severely act against a number of online florists accused of buying links two years prior.

• When: February 2013
• Violation: Probably paid links in advertorials and perhaps elsewhere
• Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; didn’t rank for own name
• Penalty Period: 11 days

6) Overstock: Discounts For Links

Overstock hit trouble with Google after a competitor found that it was offering discounts to schools in exchange for links back to the Overstock website. The links lead to particular products, with very specific anchor text that helped Overstock rank well for terms like “vacuum cleaners” and “gift baskets.” The Wall Street Journal profiled Overstock being hit by the penalty, probably tipped by the same competitor that reported Overstock to Google.

Overstock was so happy to have its penalty lifted two months later that it issued a pressrelease about the news. Overstock said the impact might hit revenues by 5% and filed a statement for investors with the SEC in the weeks after it hit. It also blamed the penalty for “adversely” impacting revenue for the first and second quarter of 2011, in its annual filing.

• When: February 2011
• Violation: Paid links, in the form of offering discounts for linking back to the site
• Penalty: Much of entire site degraded from ranking in the first page of results at Google; probably kept ranking for own name
• Penalty Period: 2 months

5) JC Penney & Paid Links

A New York Times article detailed how retailer JC Penney was apparently buying links to rank better in Google. The article even contained a rare confirmation of the violation by Google. By the time the article appeared, JCP had already been penalized.

It’s not clear if JCP ever disappeared for its own name, but it did drop for many generic terms relating to products it sold. After cleaning up the paid links — and blaming the mess on its SEO firm — JCP regained many top rankings in Google after 90 days.

• When: February 2011
• Violation: Paid links
• Penalty: Many pages degraded from ranking in the first page of Google’s results
• Penalty Period: 90 days

4) Washington Post & Selling Links

In October 2007, Google made a major change in saying that if sites sold links to others, for the purposes of helping Google rankings, the sellers themselves might be hit with a penalty. Soon after, a number of sites were penalized, including Forbes, Engadget and what will be the poster-child for this action, the Washington Post.

Unlike examples above, these sites generally didn’t lose rankings in Google, though Google reserved the right to do that. IE, you could still find their home pages and much of their content in Google searches.

Instead, the sites had their PageRank values reduced. PageRank is a value of importance Google assigns to web pages and is one of many factors it uses to decide how to rank pages. That means some of these sites might have seen less traffic. However, the bigger impact was that the lower PageRank scores made them seem less valuable places to buy from — Google’s way to help “devalue” the link selling market.

• When: October 2007
• Violation: Selling links
• Penalty: PageRank value dropped from PR7 to PR5
• Penalty Period: Uncertain when it was restored; probably within months. Currently PR8

3) BMW & Cloaking

Cloaking is a technique where a site might show one thing to a search engine’s automated “crawlers” that gather up pages and something else to human visitors. Google doesn’t like cloaking and considers it a punishable offense. And cloaking lead to one of the earliest penalties against a major brand, when German site of BMW was hit for it.

Google removed the entire site. It was big news, at the time. It also underscored what continues to be a problem for Google. When it happened, I wrote that Google would have to quickly have to restore the site because searchers expected to find it. Three days later, BMW was back in.

• When: February 2006
• Violation: Cloaking
• Penalty: Site removed
• Penalty Period: 3 days

2) WordPress & Doorway Spam

Wait, the program beloved by so many bloggers, which we even use here at Marketing Land — WordPress — was penalized by Google for spam? Yep.

Way back when WordPress was young, it once played host to pages for a third-party company that was after higher rankings. Those rankings were easier to obtain if the articles were within the popular WordPress site itself. The pages also had hidden links to other content.

Andy Baio spotted what was going on, and chaos and debate quickly followed. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg had just gone on vacation to Italy, so it was hard for him to respond to the reaction. But fairly quickly, he said it was a badly implemented experiment in advertising and apologized.

• When: March 2005
• Violation: Doorway Pages
• Penalty: Site’s home page didn’t rank for its name; PageRank was reduced from PR8 to nothing; other “inside” pages were OK
• Penalty Period: 2 days

1) SearchKing, Selling Links & The First Amendment

OK, you might argue that SearchKing isn’t a big brand like the others on the list above, so where’s the list of 10 you were promised? Relax, the bonus below has you covered. ButSearchKing is one of the earliest and most famous penalties that led to a court case supporting Google’s right to largely do what it wants with its search results.

SearchKing — a small search engine at the time — backed the “PR Ad Network,” a way for people to buy and sell links in hopes of gaining better rankings on Google. Google didn’t like that and in September 2002 dropped SearchKing’s PageRank score from PR8 to PR4. In turn, that led SearchKing to sue Google over the decrease in October 2002.

The following year, a judge ruled that Google’s listings — including whether it wants to give a site a good PageRank score or not — were Google’s opinions and thus protected from government interference under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. About four years later — and after SearchKing had abandoned the link-selling model — it regained its PageRank score, actually going up to PR7

• When: September 2002
• Violation: Selling links
• Penalty: Site’s home page didn’t rank for its name; PageRank was reduced from PR8 to nothing; other “inside” pages were OK
• Penalty Period: 3 years, 7 months

Bonus: Google Penalizes Itself, Over & Over Again

There are plenty of sites that intentionally spam Google, and this can include some big brands. But there are also sites that get into trouble without meaning to do harm. They might do things without any intention to go against Google’s rules and yet end up on the wrong side of the Google law.

There’s no better illustration of this than Google itself, which has taken action against itself five times for violations ranging from buying links to cloaking. For more about that, we invite you to read the companion article to this that we have on our Search Engine Land site:

• 5 Times Google Penalized Itself For Breaking Its Own SEO Rules

What About Expedia?

Why isn’t Expedia on the list above? That’s because it’s not a confirmed penalty. Interflora was never officially confirmed, either. But unlike with Expedia, the Interflora home page disappearing from Google for so long was effectively a confirmation that it had been hit by severe penalty.

It’s suspected that Expedia was involved with paid links. However, neither Expedia or Google will confirm that it was penalized over this. All we know is that after unusual links leading to Expedia were noted, Expedia’s visibility in Google seemed to declined, though it continued to be found for its own name.

So a penalty? Maybe. Or maybe Google did a clean-up action against suspected paid links that, when removed from the ranking equation, meant Expedia no longer did well for some terms.

When asked on an earnings call this month about any penalty, Expedia’s CEO dodged, not addressing the question directly but instead saying that year-over-year traffic from Google — which he called a “big partner” — continues to increase.

What About Everyone Else? An Open Letter To Come….

How about suspicions that the major UK bank of Halifax has been hit by a penalty? Or several other brands suspected to be hit by penalties, rumors that have been circulating in the past week or so in various venues.

We’ll have more to say about that on our Search Engine Land sibling-site tomorrow. The short story is that it’s often difficult to confirm if someone’s officially been hit by a penalty or not. Since Google almost never says, it’s down to making educated guesses.

A disappearing home page is often a good sign, but there can still be other reasons for that. A chart showing that a site plunged in estimated search visibility could be indicative of a penalty, but there could also be other reasons, too.

It’s also concerning when the tips often come from competitors with their own motives for outing some companies. Add to this the fact if we wrote about all the sites Google penalizes, or is suspected to have penalized, that’s all we’d write about.

Going forward, we’ll be looking to write about sites that have been hit by penalties when there’s something exceptionally notable about particular situations, either new lessons beyond the ones already learned by the examples above, or new twists that really are unique.

Again, tune-in tomorrow on Search Engine Land for more about this. We’ll also postscript a follow-up to our story from here. Meanwhile, don’t forgot our companion story there: