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YouTube Adds Search Suggestions, Demographic Stats, Google Contacts Import & More

Over the past week, YouTube has announced the addition of several features. In a recent YouTube blog post, YouTube announced the addition of search suggestions on YouTube.com, the import of your Google contacts, and a new and improved notification system for video comments. Plus, the Google Blog announced the addition of demographic statistics to YouTube Insights.


YouTube Search Suggestions:
Didn’t YouTube already launch search suggestions? Yes, they did internationally, but now it is available for the US version. To activate search suggestions, click on the “advanced” link on the right of the search box and select “display query suggestions as I type.” Then, next time you conduct a search, you should see search suggestions as you type. Here is an example of my Apple Safari browser:

YouTube Search Suggestions

Google Contact Importer:
Also, you can now import your Google contacts directly into YouTube. To do this, go to the My Contacts screen in YouTube and click on the “import” button and select “Contacts from Google…” The button looks like this:

GOOGLE CONTACT IMPORTER

After you click on that button, it will ask you to login to your Google account to sync up your contacts with YouTube.

New YouTube Inbox Feature:
In your inbox, you can now find that comments made to your videos are separated from comments left in response to your comment on someone else’s video.

Demographic Data in YouTube Insights:
YouTube has improved the video statistics to add data on gender and age. You can now see, on a video by video level, the typical gender (male or female) and age that views those videos.

My iPhone Popcorn Trick video has a nice spread of males and females from all age sectors watching the video:

YouTube Demographic Stats

Unfortunately, my search videos only get a small percentage of female viewers.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

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