Demographics

The Demographics report helps you understand the age range and gender distribution of your audience. You can adjust the date range and geographic region to see how the breakdown of your audience varies.

A further helpful, and once more obvious, metric or analytic piece of information comes from the demographics of who is watching your video. Demographic breakdown enables contend producers to understand the age and gender distribution of their audience.  This allows the content creators to establish a better picture of their average viewer and how to tailor their content for this audience. A bar graph, pie chart and table helps visualize the data. Through the use of either gender or geographic distribution the channel owners are able to display what percentage of their views came from whom and from where in a selected time period. Data can only be gathered on a video by video basis and not an entire channel.

The strength of this metric lies in the information breakdown it provides for each video. By sorting each video’s viewing figures by location, full age distribution and allowing for isolation of gender type the content creator has access to specific data that will enable them to tailor/target current, and indeed future, projects for success. Having access to specific information provided via demographic breakdown allows content producers to picture their average viewer during the creation process and thus tailor videos suitable for them.

The success of the Old Spice Guy campaign by Proctor and Gamble was no fluke. P&G carefully crafted the campaign to reach a specific market segment with an engaging message. Using demographic targeting they were able to ascertain who their competitors were, as well as why people bought those products and their own. Once they identified the segment that they wanted to reach, they chose the attributes of their product that were important to those people and reached out in a way that successfully engaged their target audience. P & G identified several possible segments but decided to go after men who aren’t caught up in their morning routine but who always like to look their best. Understanding that this target audience weren’t making the purchase decisions, P&G knew that any campaign would have to reach the grocery shoppers and make them want to buy the product for the men. Offline they targeted TV shows that both sexes watched together while online they created a series of 16 YouTube videos where the Old Spice Guy responded specifically to influencers.

The success of the targeted demographic campaign for Old Spice is highlighted in the growth attribute to their official Youtube channel. Their brand channel is #1 on YouTube and the #2 most subscribed to. They also saw close to 3000% growth of their audience on Twitter and close to 300% growth in traffic on oldspice.com. The use of the demographic metric enabled P&G to target their specific audience type which enabled the brand to achieve great success and recognition.

Playback Location

The Playback Locations report reveals the page, site, or device the video was viewed on.

With the growth of mobile internet and smartphone usage an increasingly important metric to keep up to date with is playback location. The playback location report reveals the page, site, or device the video was viewed on. Although there is a good chance that most people might only watch a video on www.youtube.com, there is an equally high chance that a viewer is watching a Facebook or Twitter link on a mobile device. This feature will also allow you to see exactly who is embedding your videos and which blogs/websites are giving you views! This allows content creators to find out what is working and to create more of the same type of content.

In 2011, according to research by Direct Sat TV, the average smartphone user spends nearly four and a half minutes watching videos on their device. Mobile video consumption is growing nearly twice as fast as other method of consuming videos. According to Microsoft, mobile internet usage will surpass desktop internet usage by 2014 with nearly 200+ million videos view on mobile devices already.

If your message is received on the users phone, iPad or some other location which is Youtube friendly but the message has not been set up to be playable in those locations the potential loss of viewers is high. Although people may be able to find your videos they mightn’t be able to view them and so audience growth is impaired. Identification of the playback locations that are trending highest will enable content creators to ensure that any videos they share are set up to play on those specific platforms.

Traffic sources

The Traffic sources report shows the various sites and YouTube features through which the viewer found your content.

Understanding how you are being found by your audience on Youtube is important issue for content creators as it can shed light on a referral source which they hadn’t previously been aware of. The Traffic sources report shows the various sites and YouTube features through which the viewer found your content. Sources of traffic to the content creators site can come from following links from social networking websites like Twitter or Facebook, searches on YouTube or clicks on Suggested Videos thumbnails.

When creating traffic sources report the content creator can tick or un-tick boxes, depending on preferences, next to particular sources to either include or exclude them from their report. This functionality allows the content creator to compare specific sources or isolate individual sources for further examination. Traffic sources are split into various categories and each of these are displayed in the report. These categories include some of the following: views from all traffic sources, views from youtube, views from outside youtube and mobile apps coupled with direct traffic.

The traffic sources metric allows content creators to ascertain how they are being found by users. This is a key metric as it enables the end user to be tracked back to their original source which will then enable content creators to plan for future campaigns and adapt current ones. Content creators should ask themselves are more people finding your video through search or by direct link? Does twitter create a lot of views for you? How can you adjust your video titles, descriptions or keywords to draw more search traffic? Understanding this will greatly increase traffic numbers/video views. For content creators showing up in search is a big one, depending on how you write the headline, tags, and description. Another important aspect is showing up as a recommended video from other videos on the network which means being next to a video that’s fairly relevant to yours.

Understanding traffic sources, as set out above, is becoming more important to content creators and channel owners. Analytics can tell you many things when you know what to measure and this is true for traffic sources. Understanding where traffic is coming from is vitally important to keeping your current content relevant and ensuring any future content is tailored to achieve the greatest impact.

 Audience retention

The Audience retention report is an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience.

The audience retention report is split into two different segments which are extremely useful in measuring the ability of your videos to retain viewers. These two segments are as follows:

•           Absolute audience retention: Shows 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 or starting viewing mid-video will push the graph upwards (perhaps even above 100%), while fast-forwarding or abandoning the video will push the graph downwards
•        Relative audience retention: 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

Particular interest should be played to the first 15 seconds of a video as this is when the greatest drop off in interest occurs. By interpreting this metric, content creators can see at what points of the video people either stop or start watching. A peak in the middle of the graph, infers that viewers are skipping right to that section of the video. Likewise, a dramatic viewer drop-off at a specific point could influence the inclusion of particular elements that appears at that time in the next video. Finally, if there is a gradual decline in viewership across the video, it could be inferred that the video goes on for too long and viewers got bored.

Use of this metrics will help content creators in retaining viewers as it helps highlight the video specifics that influence viewer’s decisions to either continue or stop watching a video. Going forward this will improve the content put out by the content creators. This will enable the content creator to begin thinking about their content from the eyes of the viewers rather than as the producer.

As has been covered in this piece already, analytics are everywhere and with great reason. The growth of the internet and in turn Web 2.0 has led marketers to have an increased necessity for, in a nutshell, “insider knowledge” of how their marketing efforts are progressing. With Americans streaming 43.5 billion videos in December 2011 alone, up 44% since December 2010, the growth of video can’t be ignored any more.  According to a ComScore report, titled 2012 US digital future in focus, Youtube could be considered to be the main driving factor behind this growth in online video viewing.

The average viewer has showed a willingness to watch, and engage, with content for longer periods of time with video view lengths increased from 5 minutes to 5.8 minutes. Increased numbers of video views and the time spent viewing them has placed increased importance on the metrics associated with video views. With nearly 60 hours of video being uploaded every minute the emphasis now placed on recognising what videos attract specific target audiences has taken precedence for marketing agencies. Youtube Analytics allow, and enable, marketing agencies to target their campaigns to set audiences based on a specific set of parameters that can be tailored using the above.

By Colm Reilly

The above blog is one of a series of digital marketing and social media metrics blogs that can all be found in our upcoming Marketing Metrics eBook. To sign up for this eBook, please fill in the following form below.