Viral Ad Network

Something of a Christmas tradition for me, I’ve been looking at our stats for world-wide Internet usage across the holidays and trying to make out what families are doing.

Here’s a sample of a chart I’ve been looking at, showing how many ads we were displaying per second over the festive period – you can ignore the different colours, they represent which datacentre ads were being displayed from.

It was the night before Christmas…

And all through the house not a key was pressed, nor even a mouse [button].

Yup – Christmas Eve saw the majority of web traffic drop off far earlier than the rest of the year, as people got a good night’s sleep ready for the big day. (And countries who have their main celebration on Christmas Eve settled down after a long day). Traffic during the night (at local times) was approximately 30% lower than normal.

Christmas Day

I for one was too busy putting the turkey in the oven and peeling veg to be surfing the net at the start of Christmas day – and with kids distracted by stockings and new toys, internet usage seems to have been focused in a much narrower period in the middle of the day.

This is different from the behaviour we used to see a few years ago, when there would be a large surge of traffic in the afternoon as people brought their new internet devices online. Perhaps the market in the countries we are focusing on is saturated enough that Christmas no longer brings so many new internet users.

Boxing day relaxation

Boxing day was the first day I had time to go online to catch up on emails etc – and it seems I was not alone. From early afternoon people came online in their masses – and many stayed there late into the night – making this boxing day come very close to being a record-breaking day for the Viral Ad Network – we served only 350K less ads on this Boxing day than on our highest day ever.

What did you do?

What was your internet usage like over Christmas? Did you spend Boxing day shopping online, talking to friends, or reading news sites? I’m interested in hearing – leave a comment below.

Earlier this month YouTube officially launched Analytics, a super easy way to monitor the viewing audience for your content and maximize new opportunities for promotion.

The concept isn’t exactly a ‘new’ one, YouTube has been gathering user data for quite a while now and anyone familiar with YouTube Insights will probably recognise a lot of the information in these reports, but there are a couple of handy improvements worth a mention.

So what’s new?

The first things you’ll notice are the cosmetic changes, a more intuitive layout, nice simple colour scheme, new buttons and titles for reports. But YouTube Analytics is more than just a prettier version of insights. The new overview gives an instant summary of your overall channel performance and engagement, with easy access to detailed information about individual videos that offers a more precise understanding of your audience. The data filter allows you to break down reports by content, geography, and date. Also you can now discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions, allowing you to focus your marketing on the most popular types of content.

The YouTube Analytics Overview breaks down the full details of all the options available but I’ve outlined some of my favorite features below.

Audience Retention: Formerly called Hot Spots, this report shows how far viewers watch through your video, really useful stuff if you want to understand how engaged people really are.

It measures the number of views for every moment of the video, so you can see where people have skipped forward, replayed a section or switched off. (Pay close attention to the first 15 seconds of every clip as according to YouTube that’s when your viewers are most likely to drop-off.)

YouTube even allow you to play back your video in the report to see exactly how it corresponds to the peaks and valleys of the graph. It’s a great way to work out the parts of your video that work best and identify any points where people start to get bored – that way you can focus on making the kind of content that your audience appears to enjoy.

Estimated earnings: This is useful if you’re interested in making money from your YouTube channel. You can see your total estimated earnings from the net revenue from Google-sold advertising, the estimated earnings from auction sold advertising via AdSense for Video and the estimated earnings from Doubleclick advertising and any other YouTube-sold sources.

Playback Location / Traffic Sources Report: Formally called Discovery, this report helps distinguish between how viewers found a video, i.e. through a YouTube search, Twitter link etc and where a video is being watched. It’s quite useful if you’re embedding your video on sites other than YouTube.

Why is it important to measure video performance?

If you are serious about using YouTube as a marketing tool it’s essential to set some goals, do you want it to drive traffic to your website? Generate ad revenue? Raise brand awareness? Whatever your targets are, the reporting data from analytics will help you to develop a deeper understanding of your audience and strategies and make well informed decisions when creating new content.

So if you’ve never explored the monitoring stats behind your content then this is the time to start!