What You Must Know About YouTube

This guest blog is by Chuck Tanowitz. Chuck is a co-founder of Fresh Ground, Inc, a PR and Marketing firm that combines traditional influencer relations with content marketing. He is also a former TV writer/producer and avid photographer.

So you've uploaded your video to YouTube and watched the viewer numbers go up. That's great. But where did those people come from? Who are they? What did they find interesting in the video? Was that one person watching the video 100 times or 100 people watching it once?

You're in luck, because YouTube tells you all of that.

One of the great things that came from Google's purchase of YouTube was "Insight," a button that offers just what it promises: insight behind the views.

At its most basic, Insight gives you a running graph, broken down by date, showing how many people watched your video. Click a button and you can see unique viewers in addition to the overall views. Using this is pretty simple and self-explanatory, but I like to break it down by date, starting with the last week, expanding to the last month and, if possible, to the lifetime of the video.

Personally, I'm more interested in where my visitors came from. So when I check out YouTube Insight I give a quick look to the numbers, but then I head straight for the "Discovery" menu.

Here I can see how people "discovered" my video, whether that's through embedded views on viral sites like Facebook or through placements like a on blog or a corporate site.

This is great data, but far from perfect. Sometimes Facebook shows up under multiple areas, such as under "No link referrer – embedded player" and under "External website" depending on whether people watched the video within Facebook or if they linked and watched from YouTube.

Insight also offers demographics, but that has limited effectiveness as it only shows the demographics of people who have given that information to YouTube itself. So if you are promoting video through your blog or Facebook and your users do not have YouTube accounts, they won't be measured.

Insight does do a great job of offering up regional data, so you can see where your viewers are located. This is great in measuring the effectiveness of local campaigns or if there are regional hooks in the various video campaigns you are running.

Perhaps the most interesting and unique feature is "Hot Spots." This is where YouTube really begins to provide you with some great data only they can collect. Are people pausing your video to see a particular point or rewinding a part to watch again and again? YouTube will show you where that happens. Not only is this great for measurement, but for helping you plan later campaigns.

But, as Steve Jobs would say, Just One More Thing.

Let's say you see some videos that are similar to yours but have many more views. Where are they getting those? What's driving the traffic? Just click on the down arrow on their own "views" and you can see that traffic. Now you have a sense of who is interested in that type of content.

As with any data, the value isn't just in what the numbers tell, but in how you use them. So dig in and dig around, you'll be amazed at what you can find. 

Posted by Yelena Kadeykina
Wednesday, 01 December 2010