Showing posts with label metrics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metrics. Show all posts

Recent YouTube updates

In the past few months YouTube has received a number of new features, some good, some not so good. The new features, includes a new site update which is aimed to create a more personalized experience for users. In this Post I will take a look in more detail at some of these new features.

NEW PERSONALIZED HOMEPAGE
Following the launch of iGoogle it wasn’t long before Google implemented the same idea for YouTube. The new personalized, customizable YouTube homepage is aimed at making it easy for users to find the videos. Of course this is a clever step that YouTube because to gain this service users will have to log in. This will in hind sight will increase the registrations of users on YouTube, however how much will YouTube current court case impact this?

YouTube also state that since they have launched this, data has shown an increase in the number of users visiting the homepage, the number of visits made, and the number of subscriptions users have made. YouTube are of course using this data to support that the customizable feature is a not only a better experience for users, but is also helping to expose for your videos.

The actual layout of the page itself isn’t all that different from what the normal homepage looked like. The editor picks is replaced with personalized recommendations, and in addition featured videos and new videos from your friends are shown. Below the new videos from your friends, is a feature which allows you to see the latest activity from your friends. Popular clips also are still shown at the bottom of the page.

It looks like YouTube is trying to ride the current “social network wave” with increasing the interactivity with video owners and enabling you to keep track of your friends.


IMPROVED EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS

The email messages sent from YouTube have been updated with a new layout. In addition to a modernized design and many wording changes, text for comments and messages are included directly in the body of these update emails, so you can see what these messages are without having to return to YouTube and logging in.


ANNOTATIONS
YouTube launched the first of many planed interactive video editing tools - Video Annotations. Using the Video Annotations tool this allows you to insert commentary by adding speech bubbles, notes, links, and highlight boxes anywhere you want in your videos.

I like this feature and I am looking forward to YouTube enhancing this tool in the future. One way it could be improved for example is including some images/graphs which can also be added to videos.


NEW TAB FOCUSED LAYOUT
The new tab layout features a consolidation of Share, Favorites, Playlists and Flag into a dedicated tab driven box. The share tab expands out to give a more extensive range of sharing options which includes social bookmarking and voting site, the ability to post a video to a blog, and send to the friend via email. Again another sign that YouTube really are increasing the social network side of there website.

PUBLIC VIDEO STATISTICS
Commentary is now offered in a tab next to “Statistics and Info.” This tab is not only available to video owners privately through the YouTube statistics feature, (spoken about in a previous post) but also video viewers. The “Statistics and info” tab provides information on video honors and video referrals. Video honors are awards presented by YouTube, for example: the most watched video in the UK, most discussed, most responded, etc.

Other information displayed is the names of recent users who rated the video and a map of the location where the video was film. Personally I really like this feature, but I don’t really understand how this is interesting to viewers of videos? Surely this information is only of interest to the video owners?

Overall I think these are just a number of changes which will happen this year. I think a number of users will have a problem with the new layout changes due to that fact YouTube has kept the same layout for so long. We all should have expected the changes once Google got their hands on it. Let me know your thoughts on the new layout.

Read more...

, , , , | |

Benefits of advertising with Web 2.0


Online advertising is growing faster than ever, any popular site will eventually feature adverts, but why is this form of advertising so popular? Well here a just a selection of some of the bigger benefits of online marketing:

Measurability
One of the greatest benefits of online advertising is that advertisers can track the success of campaigns far more effectively than they can do offline using web analytics and other online advertising tools. Not only can you measuring clicks through your website, you can also track user behavior to build up a complete journey of users visit. I know this quote is almost in every text book but, John Wanamaker famously said ““Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half”

Cost
Online marketing and advertising is far cheaper than advertising traditional methods. In some cases it’s even free; the only thing you need to provide is your time.

Reach Your Target Audience
Marketers often moan about the difficulties of reaching the 18-34 age group. The say that Traditional channels such as television adverts and press adverts just don’t work! But a study from the Online Publishers Association found out that 18-34 year olds are far more likely to go online (46%) than watch TV (35%), listen to the radio (three%) or read a newspaper (also three%). Marketers aim is always to reach the consumer in their natural environment with advertising that is engaging, entertaining, maybe even useful; they may be more receptive to advertising messages. Web 2.0 can be exactly all those things.

Target Niche/Micro Market Audiences
Alongside the big social networks groups there are also a few smaller social networks based around a community of shared interests. There are also different groups formed on some social network groups like Facebook, where consumers with the same interest gather and chat about that interest allowing businesses to have the target market in one place.

Increased Choice of Channels
With TV advertising you limited by time slot and choice of channel, which unless you have a lot of money could become be bad. But online, the choice of advertising formats is far more varied. But with Web 2.0 it’s all about being creative, when using web 2.0 to market anything is possible. Videos, games, banner the list goes on and on.

Read more...

, , , , , , , , , , , , | |

YouTube Insights

This week I discovered a wonderful thing….YouTube Insights! I have a channel on YouTube and have uploaded 10 -15 videos for my company, trying to reach our target customers. These are everything from How to guides, getting started videos, demos, presentations, etc.

Although I can tell how many people view the video, I always wondered who exactly was watching them, and were they attracting audience we wanted. Now thanks to YouTube Insights I can find out just that!

YouTube Insights is a free video metrics and analytics service. In March YouTube introduced YouTube Insights, which it aims to extend further in the future. It gives you the demographic breakdown of the viewers of your videos a chance to see who, where, how, when your video was viewed.

The details are collected from YouTube users whenever they watch a video, there sex, age, location and the list goes on. Video-by-video basis the demographics of viewers are broken down.

A bar chart represents the percentage of your audience in different age groups, and a pie chart showing the breakdown of gender. You can then filter that data by country or for a specific time frame.

To access this features, go to the “My Videos” section and simply click on the “Insight” link for any video where you’d like to see the stats.

Insights also shows referrals so you can see what links and methods are effective in driving traffic to your videos or channel on YouTube. As it links to Google they also provide which keywords users found your videos by when searching on Google as well as while searching on YouTube.

Although this data is extremely interesting, its key to remember and not get carried away, try to keep in mind that the data only shows information for viewers who are registered with YouTube. It would be interesting to see the number percentage of registered users compared to those who are not.

After looking at the data provided it from the videos I have created for my business, the data shown in YouTube Insights matches that of what our target customer is. Therefore the data is useful to me as it confirms that our videos are reaching our targeted consumer based

I am surprised that YouTube doesn’t charge for this service. In the future i think they will introduce an “upgraded version” of insights that YouTube users will have to upgrade to a higher level membership. Maybe they already offer a more detailed version to businesses that currently pay for adverts through YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/


Read more...

, , , , | |