YouTube’s Insight weak at the gate

Scott McAndrew — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:53:45 +0000

Limited by how many times a video has been viewed, publishers of YouTube videos have been left largely in the dark about how their video is consumed by the public. Last week YouTube made a step in the right direction for content publishers with the announcement of YouTube Insight. From the YouTube blog:

…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.

The blog posting on YouTube’s site indicated that new features will be added to the reporting capabilities quickly. That’s good news—the initial roll out features are welcomed, but aren’t all that robust or useful—especially after the drought of information previously available. YouTube, here’s a few useful metrics to add to your list:

Average duration of video view in minutes:seconds
How many times the video was shared
Views on syndication sites by syndication URL
Viewer demographic information

YouTube: if you need more ideas on what your users really want, contact me, or better, look at your user feedback over the past few years.

Oh, and one more thing. I’ve got enough places to track data. Why can’t we just get this data inside Google Analytics?

Also see:

The original post on YouTube’s blog
YouTube Insight blog post on The Official Google Blog
YouTube Insight: Underwhelming – Conde Nast Portfolio.com

Analytics means you analyze

Scott McAndrew — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 06:57:36 +0000

I’ve been contributing to our company’s sales efforts over the past few months, and keep coming across a common thread. When we speak to the marketing stakeholder at an organization, we’re usually informed that they have a company (or internal resource) that does web analytics for them monthly, and comparatively are surprised by our pricing.

The reason these potential clients are surprised at our pricing isn’t that we’re in any way gouging, it simply that what they currently get is not analytics. More often than not what they are getting are auto-generated reports which have been customized to proudly display the company’s logo at the top of the report.

In our pricing, analytics is a line item astride various activities (which are under an overall umbrella of proactive, strategic marketing), which does consume a reasonable part of our ongoing budget.

And it should. Reporting is about data. Analysis is insight into that data.

Online Marketing Performance » Reporting

YouTube’s Insight weak at the gate

Analytics means you analyze