Below we have embedded a screenshot walkthrough of the new YouTube analytics and below that we’ll go over some of the main points of interest.

For me the single most important section of the new analytics is the Audience Retention (slides 14 & 15) stats available for your videos. With insight into how your audience viewed your content, you can craft better, more engaging videos that speak directly to the interests and preferences of your audience. In the example we used the viewers’ attention dropped around the 2:00 mark, before slightly increasing and then dropping off sharply towards end of the video. This reveals a lot about what our audience enjoyed about our video and what bored them (minute 2). Equipped with this information we can refine our video style, find where to cut out excess content, speed up the pacing or even change the order of how information is presented to make it more appealing to our audience.

Individual video stats don’t stop there. Every report that is available for your channel can also be run for individual videos (provided they have been live long enough to generate data). This makes the new YouTube Analytics a great way to learn about your video content and help you become a better content producer.

The new Analytics platform is quite broad when compared to the previous version and its nuances could fill several posts. We’re going to save us both some time and supply you with an overview of the new YouTube Analytics platform and a quick guide to help you quickly find the data you’re looking for.

New YouTube Analytics Highlights 

New Overview (slides 4 & 5): Insanely helpful snapshot of your account supplied right away without having to do any digging.

Views Report (slides 7 & 8): With stats broken down into a line chart you can pinpoint successful (or disastrous) content at a glance. Sharp spikes in views may not always be good. Videos might be getting a lot of negative attention, which can spiral into a much larger crisis (the MotrinMoms ordeal started with a video), so watch this graph and investigate why the spikes occurred.

Playback Locations (slide 11): Previously unavailable, this locations page lets you know how content is being consumed. Optimize future video content according to how and where videos are being viewed the most.

Traffic Sources (slides 12 & 13): Knowing how people find your videos is important. Now you can couple query data with location data to gain even more insight into how viewers find your video content. We learned in the Playback Locations of our example that the bulk of our video views came from the YouTube watch page, which means that the majority of people are viewing the video directly and not via the YouTube channel. From there we move to Traffic Sources and see that YouTube search is ranked number 1. This reveals that people are finding our content via searching, which means we are creating content that people are looking for and that we should continue to generate similar content.

Likes and Dislikes (slides 18 & 19): Previously this was a pain in the @$$ to compile all on your own and wasn’t really worth the time. Now it’s easy to see whether your videos are getting good or bad views. Leveraging the views report to construct a timeline for spikes, we can narrow down the data and compare likes and dislikes to see if the attention your content received was positive or negative. (Although, if the response was negative enough to trigger a crisis, you will likely be aware of the problem before you read this report.)

Shares (slides 24 – 26): As YouTube is overhauling their entire service in look and feel some of the best additions they’ve made so far, in my opinion, are the sharing options (screen shot on slide 26). Letting you know where your content is going after people see it on YouTube can help identify secondary audiences for your content and places to start looking for engagement and feedback opportunities.

New YouTube Analytics Guide

Views Reports

• Views (Slides 7 & 8): Total views for the selected date range and region.
• Demographics (slides 9 & 10): The male and female split of your audience for the selected date range.
• Male =Changes all data to reflect only those identified as male.
• Female =Changes all data to reflect only those identified as female.

• Playback Locations (slide 11): The total number of views from all playback locations for the selected date range and region.
• Traffic Sources (slides 12 & 13): The locations from which your videos are being viewed. Contains information for on and off the YouTube platform.
• Views from YouTube = Views resulting from links within YouTube for the selected date range and region.
• Views outside of YouTube = Views resulting from links external to YouTube for the selected date range and region.
• Mobile apps & direct traffic = Views of unknown referrer on mobile apps and direct traffic on the YouTube watch and channel pages for the selected date range and region. Possible origins of direct traffic include email and instant messaging clients or copying and pasting a URL into the browser.

• Audience Retention (slides 14 & 15): How long your videos are keeping the attention of your viewers?
• Absolute = The views of every moment of the video as a percentage of the number of views of the beginning of the video. Rewinding and re-watching a particular moment will push the graph upwards (perhaps even above 100%), while fast-forwarding or abandoning the video will push the graph downwards.
• Relative = Shows your video’s ability to retain viewers during playback relative to all YouTube videos of similar length. The higher the graph at any given moment, the proportionately more viewers kept watching your video over the preceding seconds of playback versus other videos at that same moment in their playbacks. Rewinding and re-watching a particular moment will push the graph upwards, while fast-forwarding or abandoning the video will push the graph downwards.

Engagement Reports

• Subscribers (slide 17): The net, gains and losses of subscribers to your channel for the selected date range and region.
• Subscribers net change = The change in total subscribers calculated by subtracting subscribers lost from subscribers gained for the selected date range and region.
• Subscribers gained = The total number of times users subscribed to this channel for the selected date range and region.
• Subscribers lost = The total number of times users unsubscribed to this channel for the selected date range and region.

• Likes and Dislikes (slides 18 & 19): The combined rating of your videos and a breakdown of the likes and dislikes your content is receiving.
• Likes = Only displays data for the likes.
• Dislikes = Only displays data for the dislikes.

• Favorites (slides 2 & 3): The daily change of favorites for the data range selected.
• Favorites added = The daily addition of favorites in the date range selected.
• Favorites removed = The daily removal of favorites in the date range selected.

• Comments (slides 22 & 23): Comments left on videos for the date range selected.
• Shares (slides 24 – 26): The amount of shares for the date range selected.
• Sharing Service = Breakdown of what sharing service was used to share the videos from YouTube.

Common Buttons

• Map = switches the view to a shaded-in world map
• Video = shows data arranged by individual videos
• Geography =  shows data arranged by geographic location
• Date = shows data broken down by individual days

What do you think of the new platform changes? Do you find them to be helpful or irrelevant? Have you had a chance to poke around in them yet? In the comments below, let us know what you think about the changes and tips or tricks you might have discovered already.

Besides their viral success on Facebook and Twitter, protests around the world have been organized via Meetup, which to date lists 2,140 planned Occupy events in cities worldwide. OWS fundraising has been facilitated by Kickstarter, a previously little known crowd-source funding platform for the arts and creative projects. Kickstarter has helped Occupy organizers raise over $75K—roughly six times the group’s original goal—to fund a protest newspaper. More is being raised to fund a film about the movement. Thousands of individuals have taken the time to tell their personal stories about the economy and the movement on the Tumblr feed We Are the 99 Percent. Hundreds of thousands of Occupy-related videos have been uploaded to YouTube since the protests started mid-September, many of which were filmed and uploaded in real time at protests. Politics aside, online marketers should take note of OWS’s innovative use of online media. On a shoestring budget, OWS has been able to generate international awareness, participation, user-generated content and funding, using a variety of online media channels.

But OWS’s marketing isn’t stopping at online media. They are going offline with a 30- second TV ad. The ad features protesters at Zuccotti Park in NYC, explaining their perspectives and reasons for protesting. Using LoudSauce, another crowd-funded media platform, TV producer David Sauvage and OWS protesters have been able to raise an additional $5,000 for the television ad campaign.

$5k sound like a small TV budget? It normally would be, but Sauvage and OWS aren’t looking to air their ad on network prime time using traditional media buying. Instead they plan to place the ad via Google TV Ads. Given that TV remains the nation’s number one form of media—99 percent of U.S. households have at least one TV— it’s a smart move for OWS.

Google TV Ads

Launched in 2008, Google TV Ads strives to democratize by making television media buying accessible and affordable. The system is easy to use: Marketers create a 30 second ad, upload it to Google, set a specific budget, select target audiences—based on a variety of demographic specifications—and then Google broadcasts ad nationally. Google currently boasts partnerships with 18 cable providers and 68 networks, extending TV Ads’ reach to up to 37 million satellite households, (33 percent of all TV viewing households), across the country.

Google TV Ads is doing for TV what it did for online marketing with search. It’s bringing the accountability and transparency we have come accustomed to with online marketing to TV advertising. In doing so, it removes the stress and expense of traditional television advertising, providing smaller advertisers access to a powerful offline media channel with the data-driven precision we have come accustomed to on Google AdWords.

At The Search Agency, we’re excited about the potential of Google TV Ads and are already seeing strong results for a number of our clients.  Want to learn more?  Join us for our upcoming webinar Making Television Commercials Affordable and Measurable For the Performance-Driven Marketer on November 3 at 10am PDT. At the webinar you’ll learn why Google has decided to get into TV advertising as well as strategies for planning and launching a TV ad campaign on Google TV ads and best practices for optimizing your campaign based on actual sales and conversions. Register here.

In the article, I take a look at the question “Why do some videos rank well on Google but not on YouTube and vice-versa?” It may seem an odd question, considering that Google owns YouTube, but the answers are complicated and important for those of us in SEO to understand.

Comparing Google and YouTube video ranking strategies, I attempt to break down the relevant information for marketers, offering advice on how to improve your approach to video optimization.

The bottom line is that YouTube relies heavily on social interaction whereas Google depends primarily on a healthy back link profile. The best way to achieve both is via a robust social media and/or viral marketing strategy.

For a more complete explanation on how to better you video rankings, check out my article on Search Engine Land.

Many content producers are intimidated by the huge volume of videos on YouTube.  YouTube streams more than 1.2 billion videos a day, which leaves many marketers feeling like they have little to no chance of standing out from the crowd.  The reality is that the majority of this content on YouTube isn’t worth watching (no surprise), but the content that is good is rarely optimized. With a few easy steps, you can easily distinguish your videos and improve their rankings in both YouTube and traditional organic search:

• Remember that videos posted on YouTube are, for all practical purposes, invisible to search engines. The big guys (Google, Bing and Yahoo) have a difficult time deciphering Flash (the format of all YouTube videos), so optimizing the surrounding content is vital.
• Include appropriate keywords in the title of the video (assuming that those keywords are relevant), and use the word “video” whenever appropriate. The title is aguably the most important piece of information search engines have about your video. Since many search queires include the world “video” when searching for a video, this addition gives you an obvious but often-overlooked advantage.
• For each video, write a unique keyword-rich description that includes a URL. Put the URL at the beginning so that the user will see the link even if the “more info” option is collapsed.
• Include links to other social media profiles like Facebook or Twitter. This will not only extend the social media experience, but can also drive traffic to a customized landing page that is part of your larger campaign.
• Encourage participation. YouTube is a search engine, but it is also a social media channel. Open your video to commenting and embedding whenever possible, but keep in mind that you might have to weed out some inappropriate comments. On the other hand, some negative feedback is good because it makes the user experience more genuine.
• Make sure to use YouTube Insights, which can provide great information about demographics and view experiences. This data can help you improve your future videos.

The fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine makes it an attractive vehicle for online marketing.  Making sure your customers can find your videos through search requires adapting traditional SEO best practices and keeping in mind that search engines do not explicitly understand the Flash content of videos.

For a more thorough explanation on SEO and YouTube and additional tips for improving your YouTube search results, make sure to check out the original article on iMediaConnection.

Video served on RAIS will initially show as a thumbnail…

Until clicked. The video opens up and extends the page, essentially pushing down all other listings. Videos can be viewed full screen without leaving the search page & can also be shared with social sites and blogs.

• RAIS will host any length of video. Videos under one minute generally work best but Yahoo reports having some clients running branding videos up to 4 minutes long.
• If video is not used, other templates include an image variation where a brand logo highlights the SERP ad and the searcher is given various actionable, deep linking options.
• Up to 4 additional landing page links can be included to show in the results so customizable links can drive traffic to top converting pages.
• RAIS ads will only currently show in the upper North placement of your brand SERP.
• Keywords included in the RAIS program will run on exact match only.
• Only brand & brand modified keywords can be included in RAIS campaigns. For example, the site ChadsRadBikes.com could have ‘chadsradbikes.com’ & ‘chadsradbikes’ but also ‘chadsradbikes homepage’, ‘find chadsradbikes.com’, ‘chads rad bikes newsletter’, etc. & even misspellings. Some of the initial participants are currently running over 400 keywords in their RAIS campaign.
• RAIS ads will replace existing sponsored search ads on the brand terms selected. Regular text sponsored search ads will appear on advanced match queries and on partner networks for those brand terms.
• Currently, the keyword set & marketplace determine pricing. RAIS beta now has a minimum cost of $15K/month but this will rise depending on spend of the KW set you want served. Higher volume keywords are more expensive and some low volume keywords will not increase pricing at all.

Here are a few additional ‘best practices’ to consider when using video in SEM:

• Online Video is generally displayed at 425 (width) by 355 (height). Import your video as close to this as possible to avoid stretching.
• Have call to action at end of video to instruct the viewer on ‘next steps’.
• Post quality content only – Why should people care? Videos should have a quality picture, sound, music as well.
• Make it easy for users to grab video and share it on rich media and social sites.
• Make sure your URL appears in the video – generally best placed at the beginning since engagement falls off rapidly after  10-15 seconds.

Clicking on the plus sign launches the VPB clip, expanding the video. If a user clicks on the ad after having already clicked on the VPB, the advertiser will not be charged for two clicks.  Advertisers pay based on a cost-per-click (CPC) bid.

VPB is simply an alternative to using Text ads for your Google AdWords search campaigns.  We have found that entertainment clients (with numerous video assets) make the best advertisers to use VPB.  At the moment, Google does not have the functionality to upload VPB clips in the AdWords UI or AdWords Editor, so advertisers have to submit their clips to Google.  The turnaround time is approximately one or two business days.  It can sometimes take longer.  The process of uploading VPB clips can be quite laborious on Google’s end.  As such, we only upload one VPB clip at a time in a handful of ad groups.  Submitting more than one VPB clip for a large number of ad groups might take more than a day or two for Google to complete.  Plan your campaigns accordingly.

If possible, use QuickTime clips for VPB.  They’re no larger than 200×150 and 10MB when zipped.  Anything larger will cause the email submission to be bounced back as undeliverable. The clip should be no longer than two minutes, but it’s recommended that the clips be much shorter.  Users tend to lose interest by the 30-second mark.

VPB has been an excellent fit for Travel Channel, enabling their users to immediately  watch previews of upcoming episodes, in addition to driving traffic to their web site.  Travel Channel is always open to testing new products, and VPB in particular has been a proven success for them.  CTR for Man v Food has gone from 2.18% (Jan 2009) to 6.34% (August 2009) since we implemented VPB.  That’s a 190% increase.

UPDATED:  Travel Channel VP, Digital Marketing Pete Dorogoff was quoted today in an AdAge article about media companies getting more into paid search.  “We buy search terms around the talent, food, locales and major tourist attractions,” Dorogoff said. “With search we’re casting a wide net and seeing what shakes out.”

Much like Google’s own AdWords program, Sponsored Search allows advertisers to bid on keywords in an auction-based pricing system in order to display videos and text on the top and right rail of organic search results within YouTube. In fact, the program uses the AdWords algorithm and advertisers can manage their accounts right from the AdWords user interface.

However, because YouTube users may be searching for slightly less sophisticated reasons than users on Google (searches skew toward entertainment or diversion rather than information or purchase research), the types of keywords one should bid on may be different. In a recent webinar on the new YouTube program, AdWords representatives encouraged advertisers to focus more on one/two word, high volume queries that may be too expensive in AdWords but that may be cheap and effective in Sponsored Search.

In order to learn the nuances of YouTube’s new offering on our own, The Search Agency’s SEM Editorial Department collaborated to create a video advertisement for Travelation, a discount online travel website. As no budget existed for this test, the team designed a fast, funny video concept that could be executed for free using only existing resources. TSA employees acted in the piece, which was shot with webcams around the office and edited with out-of-the-box Windows software.  Have a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSSO5JpD6SI

While the video has only been online for a short time, response has been overwhelmingly positive and TSA has quickly identified some of the following best practices:

• NOT having overly-polished content is actually an advantage on YouTube, which is mostly made up of videos produced on home cameras and cell phones. Too slick of a presentation screams “commercial” and can lead viewers to avoid your content.
• Comments left after the video can provide clues to what type of viewers are interested in your video as well as insight into which terms you should be bidding on.
• The webinar recommendation bears out: advertisers shouldn’t be shy about trying terms they would never bid on in AdWords – very general terms, related products they don’t sell, terms that describe their target audience… Creativity in approach can lead to substantial rewards.
• In addition to the paid placement, once MUST pursue organic methods of getting traffic in order to best take advantage of YouTube’s audience: optimizing your channel page, choosing highly relevant tags for the video, commenting on related videos with your ad’s URL, etc.
• Using a coupon code is an easy way to track the efficacy of your video, which can be embedded and displayed in many other places outside of YouTube such  as Facebook, Digg, etc.

8mm chopping, cutting and editing the 'old' way.

My brother and I would waste away an afternoon with my parents 8 mm camera pretending we were famous film directors. Steven Spielberg started this way too, but I believe his movies were a ‘little’ better.

Our editing equipment consisted of a small cutting board, a pair of scissors and my parents’ bedroom window. We’d hold the film up to identify what we considered to be ‘the good bits’ (anything with either of us in them), use our fingers to mark the ends, and then cut the film. There was then a process with tiny adhesive ‘joins’ where you’d match up the butt ends of the film and splice them together. It was exciting stuff for 9 and 10 year olds back in the 60′s.

We were equally excited when it came to ‘showtime’, threading the film through the first reel, looping through what seemed like 50 switchbacks before finally affixing the film’s end through the back reel.

We’d draw curtains and invite the family (those that couldn’t escape) in to view our ‘masterpiece’ – which was generally my brother or I dancing, kicking something or pointing dramatically. There was no sound, but who cared? We were famous for an instant, even if it was to a captive audience, our work was the fruit of our labors, something to be proud of, our 5 minutes of fame.

Fast forward 40 years.

The film-making process is somewhat easier. To say the least. Broadcasting to the world is even easier. The equipment can fit in the palm of your hand, the projector no longer exists, replaced by a computer screen and a medium that reaches millions, drawn curtains or not. The effort required to make a movie is infinitesimally smaller, enough so that the act of movie-making for the masses is almost mundane.

So why the reminiscing and fixation with movie making ?

Last week, I was driving down Ventura Blvd, here in Los Angeles, and I saw this sign.

In a world where everyone is a content producer just by having a video-equiped cell phone it’s strange that a service exists to make it an even easier process.

What could they be offering?

Tips on how to be the next Fail Blog, Barely Political or Happy Slip?

Webcam etiquette? Lighting techniques for your lounge? Sound editing for dummies? Script advice for the den? Grips for the garden? Blocking for the bathroom? How to sound cogent with a hangover? How to be cool?

No, I didn’t go in to find out how much cooler they could make my kids’ home videos, but I will dig out my old 8mm blockbusters the next time I’m in the UK.

Steven Spielberg better watch his back.