January 24, 2011
Is anyone watching your YouTube video?
If you’ve done anything with video in the last 5 years, you’ve probably uploaded it to YouTube. At a recent Google Seminar co-sponsored by the Ad Council, the panelist YouTube explained what one should do to get a video discovered. One of the other things he and another panelist spoke about were the YouTube Insights.
If you’ve never looked at the data available on YouTube beyond “view” for your posted videos, you’re in for a real treat.
YouTube offers clear directions on how to use its insights. But for quick reference here you go:
- Sign into YouTube.
- Click on your profile name and choose “My Videos”
- If you have many videos and want to see data on your channel overall, click “Insights” in the top navigation. If you want to see insights for a specific video, click that video then click “Insight stats” at the top of the page.
- You can review a lot of data but today I want to specifically call out “Hot Spots” to you. So click on Hot Spot.
Assuming your video has had enough views to allow YouTube to evaluate it, you will see a green line in a chart that parallels the video playing. It should look something like this:
The explanation from YouTube reads:
“The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Audience attention is an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience.”
What I think is so exciting about Hot Spots is that it can give you very valuable insight into what might be keeping your audience’s attention or losing them. So the next time you are getting ready to make a video you can consider these learnings.
And for work that is already produced and you see a drop off before the call-to-action (CTA) is revealed, use the annotation tool to call out your website or desired action right from the beginning. Sometimes people argue that ruins the reveal or drama/creative hook of the spot but it’s YouTube, they either searched for it or the title/description have already given them a hint to what it’s about. And if they don’t make it to CTA what’s the point of the video? So I say put in annotations and embed links to make it easier for the viewed to take that next step and do what you want them to do.
April 8, 2010
Unfair to Compare: Considerations for Setting Goals and Evaluating Social Marketing Campaigns
Creating goals and evaluating the success of our social marketing campaigns tends to elicit the same types of questions:
- What can we expect from this campaign?
- How do these results measure up to other campaigns?
While these types of questions help provide context (in setting expectations and evaluating whether or not a campaign did well), they force us to group and compare campaigns that often have very different objectives.
So, is it really fair to average or compare results from campaigns? In other words, can we really compare a campaign that asks people to participate in a 3-day walk to cure breast cancer with one that encourages adults to adopt a pet?
You would think that if you had enough social advertising campaigns you could eventually calculate some averages (e.g. ad recognition or web visits) that might help you understand how your campaign is doing. But, even with data from the Ad Council’s 53 campaigns, there are still too many factors that contribute to the success or failure of a campaign. Among them, consider the following:
- Target audience type (e.g. General Market, Hispanic, African American, Teens, Kids, etc.)
- Length of campaign
- Whether or not you message/social issue is a hot topic in the news
- Call-to-action type (e.g. self-contained message in an advertisement vs. need to learn more by calling or visiting a website)
- Perceived difficulty of your call-to-action (e.g. Adopt a teen from foster care vs. Talking to your kids about underage drinking)
- Type and amount of media distributions
- Level of media support (online and traditional)
- Fulfillment type (Hotline vs. Web)
- The public’s familiarity with your organization
- Type and amount of online activities used to promote the campaign
As these factors represent a drop in the bucket of all the things we should consider when establishing goals and evaluating a campaign, my recommendation is to avoid the comparisons. Instead, we need to invest in the time and resources to establish best practices and share them (across industry) so that each of us can shape stronger social advertising campaigns.
Filed under: Research and Evaluation
Tags: Campaigns, changing behavior, ROI
December 21, 2009
Keeping Them on the Bandwagon: How to Present Social Media ROI
Have you ever been to a presentation about your organization’s social media strategy and seen this slide: “Over 2,000 Facebook fans; 500 Twitter followers and 3,000 MySpace friends!”? “Great,” everyone at the table thinks, “we are officially in the social media space – we have friends and fans – but now what?
Though 88% of executives at US non-profit organizations are currently experimenting with social media, only 51% report using it actively and 79% are uncertain about how to demonstrate its value for their organization, according to a survey conducted by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research.
Until we truly demystify social media ROI (which I believe will take good old-fashioned time) and in light of this recent study, perhaps our efforts are better spent learning how to present what we do know and make sure your organization’s executives don’t fall off the social media bandwagon. After all, the use of social media for social good continues to be an online trend, making social marketing messages popular and in demand.
Filed under: Internet, Social Media
Tags: How To, ROI, Social Media
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