YouTube Insight for SEO Experts

YouTube has become a household name and having a popular video on this site can be a powerful marketing tool or a complete waste of time and money. It’s all depends on how you go about it. SEO companies and internet marketers have been trying to find the right angle to employ video, as a growing online medium to launch and grow their campaigns.

A bit like with everything, it’s all about how you use the data available to you. Until recently I used TubeMogul to streamline my video distribution, but more importantly it was the only tool that would give me comprehensive statistics on my audience. If you haven’t used this tool before visit http://www.tubemogul.com and sign up for an account and have a browse.

Now YouTube features their Insight option which reveals a wonderful plethora of information about your visitors and their behaviour. Whether this is a response to TubeMogul’s features is irrelevant but what is important is the information that they share with us. The tool is essential split up in to four distinct sections.

Let’s start from their overview dashboard or as they call it “Summary”. This view features an executive summary of all relevant information such as: Views, My Videos, Demographics and Popularity. Pretty simple and to the point, as always is with Google’s products.

The “Views” option shows how many views all your videos were getting in a historical graph timeline. This is pretty useful if you wish to see cumulative popularity of all published material.

“My videos” section displays the percentage value popularity breakdown of all videos in form or a simple bar graph. This one gives is a fairly good idea on the effectiveness and popularity of each individual video we’ve published.

The view that is particularly exciting is the “Demographics” which reveals the age and gender breakdown of all viewers.

And finally the “Popularity” option shows the geographic popularity of your videos relative to those of other video publishers. This view is simply represented by the world map coloured in different shades of green.

All of the dashboard features described above can be modified by date range and country using the two drop down menus at the top and provide further information detail once you actually select the option from the top tabs. Once you select an actual video, YouTube reveals even further detail from which two of the most exciting are the “Discovery” and “Hot Spots”. The first one breaks down the referring sources which is pretty handy to have, but the second one is a really pleasant surprise.

“Hot Spots” page features an interactive timeline of audience’s excitement level and attention during your video. The red position marker tracks the graph in sync with the video. The two play side-by-side. Apparently the information is relative to videos of similar length and derived from user behaviour such as exit points and rewind spots. The ups and downs are represented by Hot-Cold scale and just like everything else in the Insight this feature and its information are very intuitive and easy to follow. What this leaves us with, is a powerful tool in hands of SEOs and video marketers. Let’s see what we can come up with.