VideoVoo: Online Video Marketing

Once you uploaded your video on YouTube, you obviously want to know more about your precious 15 second viewers, not just how many views you have, or comments you get, but where your visitors come from, how long and how many times they have played your video, if they shared the video, or subscribed to your channel, etc.

Ideally, you would want to see something that currently Google Analytics offers, after all, YouTube and Google Analytics are kicking ass in the same stable for free, but for a while you will have to be happy with the highly simplified YouTube Insight metrics.

uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks. (from the Google Blog)

How can you get the YouTube Insight metrics?
1, go to your account
2, (manage) my videos
2.5, Videos, Favorits and Playlists
3, look at the list of the videos you uploaded and you will notice that there is an “About this Video” option on the right side of each video you made
4, click About This Video, and see your graphs and map charts.

Here’s a video how-to:

You can click on the individual states to see a video view graph, but check out the message at the bottom: “The data represented in the graphs is an informational, aggregate representation and the number of actual views may be higher or lower.” In addition, when you go into specific states (forget cities - not an option now), you will not get the relative number of views at all. I suppose most viewers will see a pretty peak around the video upload date and/or when a major blog, news site linked to the videos - and then a long flat line. Yes, I am sort of disappointed with the current YouTube Insight metrics. It seems to give something but then you are left with the feeling of being given nothing. OK, the states are good info, but that’s the only metric you can use for something.

Not enough data?

As an advertiser, the YouTube Insight data you get is so insufficient, so anti-insight you are better off if you register a new domain or get a free blog (wordpress, blogspot, what have you) and embed the video uploaded on YouTube, Revver, Metacafe, Daily Motion, etc. Then put Google Analytics code behind the blog/microsite to get more info on relative site behavior. This time loads of versatile, in-depth info from Analytics.

I know we are too much used to getting things for free. So let’s see the benefits of the new YouTube Insight: the good thing about the whole newly introduced YouTube Insight is that it’s free and available to non-pro users as well. Will it make non-pro users happy? Maybe. Let me know.