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.

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!

This awesome little infographic from Voltier Digital examines the art of viral content marketing. From the importance of understanding virality and the power of social networks through to the anatomy of viral content & sharing and tips on self promotion, the all important ‘secret sauce’ for any viral hit.

YouTube automatically generate three representative video thumbnails once you have uploaded your content, from which you can choose the most appropriate as the lead image. When editing your video, make sure that the frame within the middle of the video is interesting and engaging as this will be the prime thumbnail. If you’re feeling particularly creative, you can also optimise all three thumbnails allowing the lead image to change every few hours which is an interesting way to keep the video fresh! VAN recommend the following rules when choosing a lead image:

1. The image should include a face or at least a person.

Displaying a face/person in the lead image will engage viewers by providing facial interaction.

2. The image should be clear suggesting high video quality.

Higher quality images help the viewer become more informed. If the image is of poor quality, viewers will be less likely to click on it and may assume that the video content will also be unclear.

3. The image should be relevant to the communities in which you are targeting.

When targeting a specific audience/community, the image should reflect the interests of the relevant group.

4. The image and the video title should work together to tell an engaging story.

The title and image of the video need to be compatible in order to deliver a cohesive message and engaging story.

Weekly status emails

Want to automatically be kept up to date with how your campaign is performing? You can now schedule weekly campaign emails from your account.

To configure emails, log into your dashboard and click on your username in the top right hand corner.

Export daily counts to Excel

One of our most requested features, most advertisers can now export their daily stats straight to Excel.

If your campaign dashboard shows you a day by day breakdown of recent actions for your campaign, then after clicking through for more detail, you can export the table straight to CSV (for Excel or other spreadsheets)

Network Quality Assurance:

We have always spent a large amount of effort monitoring the quality of sites on our network and of all actions recorded.

Using our own technology, years of our own data and data provided by security groups and ad networks around the world, we’re happy to say this new update lets us filter each display live in more depth than ever before.

Integrating immediate filtering of  tens of thousands of IP subnets, thousands of inappropriate domains, and immediate responses to new suspects, we’re now filtering out inappropriate sites and practices before your ad even gets shown.

Read All About it…

Want to keep up to date with Advertiser news from VAN?

We’ve added a feed of the latest Advertiser blog posts to your homepage, along with information about upcoming maintenance.

YouTube is by far the most well established video-hosting platform on the market and with Google now including YouTube videos on their main search results pages, it’s essential to get the SEO right if you want your video to be noticed.

Over 13 million hours of video were uploaded to the site last year alone and competition for views is higher than ever, so we’ve put together a few handy tips on how to optimise your video to give it the best chance of being found…

1 – Titles & Descriptions:

Yes it sounds obvious but worth a mention, try and use as many relevant keywords as possible in your title as it’s the first thing people will read when skimming through search results.

It’s important to spend time writing the video description because it will show up both in YouTube and Google search listings. You should try and repeat relevant keywords again here, (being careful to avoid keyword stuffing). Remember that only the first few words will be shown in search results but keywords from the additional text will be detected and help make your video more easily searchable.

2 – Keywords:

Think carefully about the keywords that are most appropriate and do some research to find out what search terms are popular. YouTube have a handy Keyword Tool that allows you to view search volumes for individual words, analyse the demographics of people searching for them and generate suggestions. Avoid the temptation to include words simply because they are popular if they don’t have a direct relation to your video, it may result in an initial traffic boost but you will end up with high bounce rates which will tell YouTube to make your content less visible.

3 – Video Thumbnail:

Choosing a good thumbnail image for your video can dramatically increase the chances of it standing out. We’ve all heard of the expression ‘judging a book by its cover’ and rightly or wrongly that’s exactly what people do on YouTube. When presented with a list of thumbnail video images, viewers tend to skim down the first page and pick those with the most striking pictures.

After uploading your video you will have 3 thumbnails to choose from. These images are not randomly selected but calculated on fixed positions within your clip so it’s possible to manipulate the video to control your options.

You can calculate the exact position of your thumbnails by following the equation below…

X = Video length (in seconds)

Y = X divided by 4

Y is the 1st thumbnail.

2 x Y is the 2nd thumbnail

3 x Y is the 3rd thumbnail.

If you find that a bit too much to think about in advance you can always tweak your video directly in YouTube and see how your edits effect the thumbnail images selected.

4 – Links:

Google will use the number of links to your video to determine its position in the search rankings, so you should create links everywhere you can. Use your website, write comments with links on relevant blogs, you can even build up links within YouTube itself by creating video responses to other relevant clips, (again be careful not to over do this or it might be identified as spam). Don’t forget to leverage social media sites and post regular updated links on Twitter, Facebook and other services and make sure you enable embedding so other people can post your video on their sites.

A really good way to boost the number of links to your video is to use a seeding service like the Viral Ad Network which will distribute your video and links across hundreds of blogs encouraging the viral sharing effect to really get your clip noticed!

5 – Be aware of user signals:

YouTube want to keep viewers engaged with its content, so in order to make the most relevant videos more easily searchable it uses an algorithm that tracks user interaction.

It’s worth keeping in mind some of the following signals that it takes into account…

Expect the usual *viral shenanigans*, further *meme-battling* and free beer on us

To get (free) tickets, check the following Eventbrite

http://kittencamplondonoct.eventbrite.com/

Get involved: suggestions for the best memes you’ve seen recently to #KittenCamp

@rubber_republic

@ViralAdNetwork

Kaythxbai

The expanding lightbox will be displayed as a site overlay and will grab the viewer’s attention, whilst keeping them on your site (therefore no site traffic will be lost). This also means that we can host flash games or more complex video campaigns via the Fun Links on your site.

Here’s an example…

Expanded ‘Lightbox’ Unit

You can also customise your Fun Links to suit your site – another cool feature! Here are some examples of customised Leaderboard ad units…

Ellie took on the role of Mr Whippy for most of the day whilst Liz was armed with some very large umbrellas!

Our first stop was VCCP who seemed to enjoy an early lunch time ice cream!

The ice cream love was extremely well received at Mediacom keeping Dan the ice cream man very busy!

This lovely lady’s name was Van so we had to have a pic!

This gentleman had even dressed for the occasion!

The ladies from Glue were fully prepared for the rain!

Sharing the ice cream love!

Another busy stop!

Ellie was briefly reunited with her long lost brother!

The ice cream dream team!

Thank you to all of you who shared the ice cream love with us, it was a very enjoyable day! Maybe we’ll see you again next year!

Check out all of the pics from the day on our Flickr album and also the Bristol #icecreamcrawl!

Read it, it’s good!