Viral Ad Network

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!

There’s no magic spell to guarantee a viral success but there are a few key points worth keeping in mind if you want to make sure you give your content the best possible chance to get the attention it deserves.

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.