A few years ago, there was a big movement called Quantified Self, in which we would apply principles of analytics and data science to our lives with fitness trackers and other apps that would help quantify how we were living. For a variety of reasons – mainly overhead – that movement never really took off.
However, in some ways, the data collection for that movement never ended. Your smartphone, your watch, your laptop, your tablet, your smart speakers – you’re surrounded daily by devices that are constantly gathering data about you and storing it. Big technology companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook use this data all the time to target you with advertising and offers.
Here’s where our quantified self story gets interesting. Thanks to privacy regulations and other pressures on big technology companies, much of that data is available to us for free. We can, should we choose to, download everything Google has tracked about us, everything we’ve interacted with on Facebook, etc. and analyze it ourselves. We could conduct personal data science experiments, personal data analysis on the data being collected about us.
Why would we want to do this? Curiosity, for one; in exploring data about you, you might learn some interesting things about yourself. Another would be to get a big picture perspective about yourself from the tech company’s point of view. What do THEY see when their algorithms and machine learning models look at you? Finally, and most important to me professionally, what can we learn about our marketing assumptions based on the person we should know best?
Obtaining Your Personal Data
First, you’ll need to obtain your data. I’ve linked some of the major providers below; almost any can be found by searching for “how to download your X data” where X is the name of the service. Pro-tip: if you use a social network or other tech service that doesn’t permit you to download your own data… you might want to stop using that service.
- How to download your Google data (including YouTube and other Google properties)
- How to download your Facebook data
- How to download your Twitter data
- How to download your Instagram data
- How to download your Tiktok data
You’ll typically have a few different data format options:
– HTML: this is a summary of your information you can use in your browser. For data exploration purposes, it’s almost useless.
– JSON: this is your data in the JSON format, which most data science tools can import and use. If you have Microsoft Excel with PowerQuery or the Data Analysis add-on, you can use this format, too.
– CSV: some services allow you to get CSV formatted data, which you can import into nearly any data analysis tool.
For this article, I used the JSON exports and the R language plus the jsonlite package to process it.
Analyzing Your Personal Data
Once you’ve got your data, then what? Let’s look at an example. I want to examine my YouTube viewing habits, so I’ll open up my YouTube watch history to see what I’ve been watching on YouTube. We have to import it, clean it up by removing fields we don’t need, and see what’s in the box, as it were.
We can see from this snapshot that I’ve watched 23,611 YouTube videos in this data export from 2011 onwards, along with details like who the video publisher is, the video URL, the channel URL, and the date and time.
There’s already a lot we can unpack here.
The Big Picture
Let’s first summarize the table by views over time. How many videos per month have I watched, and is there a pattern?
Two interesting things to note here. First, we see my YouTube usage started to go up dramatically in 2018. Why? That’s when I started my former video show, You Ask, I Answer. YouTube is phenomenally good at getting us to watch more stuff because its recommendation engine is crazy accurate, so every day when I logged in to upload my video of the day… I ended up watching something, too.
Second, my usage REALLY went up around April of 2020. Why? Pandemic. Those first few months of the pandemic, I was watching a LOT of YouTube video. You probably were, too.
From Google’s perspective, I became much more valuable to YouTube and Google Ads in 2018 because I was consuming much more video. Let’s restrict further analysis from January 2018 onwards.
Top Videos
Some videos I’ve rewatched more than others in the last 3 years. Which are they?
The top video is a livestream I listen to during the workday when I’m writing or coding; that’s no surprise. The rest is almost all music – which shows what YouTube really is for me, an audio player that happens to come with video. This is a really interesting insight for me personally, because that’s not how I think of YouTube mentally as a marketer, but it’s clearly what I do as a consumer.
From Google’s perspective, if advertisers want to get my attention, they don’t need to work super hard at targeting specific interests. They just have to aim at the music I listen to.
Channels
Next, let’s dig into channels. When we think about influencers, we’re not thinking about individual videos, we’re thinking about channels and producers. Who do I watch?
Unsurprisingly, as someone who published a daily video for almost three years and quality checked my videos, I watch my own channel the most. Ignoring that, we get a mix of all sorts of cultural stuff – Stephen Colbert, video mixes from the music show The Voice, First We Feast (the folks who run the Hot Ones show), Conan O’Brien, The Voice Ukraine:
From a marketing perspective, if you wanted to get my attention, you’d have a very wide range of very disparate, seemingly unrelated topics to choose from. This highlights one of the dangers of advertising: if you make assumptions about your audience, those assumptions might be thoroughly incorrect. Would you know, based on my age, demographics, and profession that a channel like Tropical Tidbits (tropical storm analysis) or Violet Orlandi (great Brazilian cover musician) or The Graham Norton Show (English talk show) would be good targets? Probably not.
To be fair, I’m even surprised by this data analysis. I didn’t think I watched nearly as much of some of these channels as I thought, and other channels I watched far more of than I thought.
Frequency
Finally, let’s get into the ad targeting nitty-gritty. A lot of people – especially in B2B marketing – advertise Monday-Friday, 9 AM – 5 PM in the targeted audience timezones, a practice in advertising called day-parting. But the question is… is that when the audience is paying attention?
I don’t know about you, but usually from 9 AM to 5 PM… I’m working. And at least for my YouTube viewing history, I’m watching far more video in the evenings than I am any other time – between 8 PM and 10 PM Eastern time:
If you were a B2B advertiser using YouTube ads/Google Ads during the workday… you probably missed me. Well, that and when I upgraded to YouTube Premium as part of a promotion with Discord, now you’ve definitely missed me, but that’s a topic for another time.
The bottom line here is your audience may not be paying attention when you think they are. When you’re launching a new campaign, you may want to run some tests around the clock, every hour of every day, to see when your audience is actually paying attention versus when you think they’re paying attention.
What I Know About Myself As a Marketer
This personal data science adventure, analyzing my own data to see who I am and what I watch, is a powerful example of looking at yourself through the lens that big tech companies see us through. I’m not much of a YouTube show watcher, but I’m most assuredly a YouTube music listener. Yet when we mentally think about YouTube, especially as marketers, we think of it as a place that’s video first. My own viewing history shows that’s not always a reliable conclusion.
Here’s a quick question to think about: if you’re running YouTube ads, is the audio track ALONE enough to convey meaning, like a radio ad? If not, and your audience is anything at all like me, using YouTube to listen rather than watch… you might want to amend your YouTube ad strategy.
As a marketer, seeing how I behave on YouTube gives me pause about the counsel I might give clients. For sure, I might give serious thought to surveying my audience about what they watch on YouTube and more important, who they watch – then use that information to possibly conduct sponsorships. I might get more out of, say, sponsoring Violet Orlandi’s channel with a 10K ad budget then I would get out of running 10K of video ads on YouTube if I found out my audience were die-hard fans.
We can’t – thankfully, as a consumer – get this level of data from YouTube about anyone except ourselves. However, we can and should survey our audiences frequently to ask them what they’re watching, who they’re watching, where, and when. With that information, we can become better, smarter, and more effective marketers, supporting the things our customers already support and earning new attention in ways that are not only less invasive, but more impactful.
Take the time and effort to analyze your own personal data from the big tech companies. Look at what you search for, what you watch or listen to, what you shop for – you might find some fascinating insights about yourself, and pick up some useful learnings and thought starters for your marketing.
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