December 9, 2010
YouTube: Best Practices & Tips for Success
Does your YouTube channel need a boost? We have a few tips to share…
Last week, the Ad Council and Google hosted a seminar on some best practices for YouTube. We tried to go beyond the basics and covered things like analytics, increasing traffic to your channel and the latest tools.
Our top-notch panel included YouTube, Blue State Digital, It Gets Better Project, EPA, and Natural Resources Defense Council.
Click here for the presentations…and before you go, a few tips:
YouTube’s Roy Daiany (Display Account Manager) covered “7 Ways To Get Your Videos Discovered”:
- Categorize and Tag Your Content
- Add annotations, captions, subtitles
- Get Interactive with Google Moderator
- Share Your Uploads & Channel Activity
- Enable Embedding
- Add Subscribe Button to Your Website
- Utilize Paid Media (things like Pre-Roll InStream, InVideo Overlay, banners)
- Track Your Performance with YouTube Insight
Blue State Digital discussed the wildly successful It Gets Better Project which was recently created to inspire hope for LGBT teenagers facing harassment. Within two months, this project–which started with one YouTube video–turned into a worldwide movement, inspiring over 5000 user-created videos and over 15 million views. How did they do so much so quickly?
- Create a simple page that could capture emails and collect videos
- Work with YouTube’s API
- Help keep the barrier to entry low
- Make the page shareable over social networks like Facebook and Twitter
Kay Morrison from EPA, talked about the unique challenges facing Federal agencies—things like 508 requirements, disclaimers, cookies and copyright issues.
And the Natural Resources Defense Council provided some great case studies and discussed the Hot Spot tool. That’s where you can view the ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video. Bottom line? Keep your video short (no more than 1 ½ minutes) and display your “call to action” throughout your video, not at the end.
And finally, we didn’t cover what makes a good YouTube video but you can learn more by viewing a previous webinar (hosted by GSA’s Web Manager University) that featured YouTube’s Steve Grove (Head of News and Politics). I like these points in particular:
What if I don’t have any resources?
- Use a Flip cam
- Build a hub, aggregate content
- Find volunteers on YouTube
- Get local schools (civics classes) to do video projects for govt.
- Use slide shows/animations if you don’t have video
- It doesn’t have to be glamorous…just authentic!
Filed under: Campaigns, Communications, Federal Government Communications, Internet, New Media, Social Media
Tags: changing behavior, Social Media, Website Traffic, YouTube
April 21, 2010
Key Drivers of Website Traffic
In the past, I have taken a pretty hard stance on the idea that norms and averages across social advertising campaigns should not be used when trying to establish goals and measures of success. The chart below, which illustrates website visitor data for 43 Ad Council campaigns, supports this notion. It is clear that there is no normative pattern in website sessions among our various campaigns; therefore, providing an average to help establish a goal for website visitors would be setting ourselves up for failure. Ultimately, by using an average we would over or under-estimate a campaign’s true potential to garner visitors.
So, in order to understand what drives website traffic to our social advertising campaign websites, the Ad Council worked with Robinson and Muenster Associates (RMA) to conduct a cross-campaign regression analysis. Here are some the key findings that can help provide context to our campaigns when establishing goals and evaluating success:
- When your target audience is broad (e.g. adults 18+), it results in more web sessions per month
- When a sponsoring organization is publically well known, it results in more web sessions per month
- When a micro-site or “vanity URL” is created specifically for a social marketing campaign (rather than driving to an existing website), it results in fewer web sessions per month
- When a URL name is difficult to remember, it results in fewer web sessions per month
- When the social issue you are advertising appears in Google Search’s top 5 listings, it results in more web sessions per month
- Increased support/placement in Google’s AdWords results in more web sessions per month
- When a you are more active in promoting the social issue (through several outlets and partnerships), it results in more web sessions per month
Filed under: Research and Evaluation
Tags: Campaigns, Research, Website Traffic
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