YouTube Measurement (Part 1)

With all the hype around Face­book and Twit­ter we often over­look the third most pop­u­lar site on the web – Youtube (accord­ing to Alexa rank­ings).  YouTube has evolved from col­lec­tion of music videos and user gen­er­ated con­tent into a cor­po­rate friendly mar­ket­ing chan­nel.  Sev­eral com­pa­nies such as EA Games (Spore is a favorite of mine), Intuit, Visa, Microsoft and Toy­ota (with their extremely suc­cess­ful Sienna chan­nel) all have suc­cess­ful YouTube mar­ket­ing campaigns.

To help online mar­keters lever­age their YouTube pres­ence effec­tively, Omni­ture Con­sult­ing has released a YouTube Mea­sure­ment and Opti­miza­tion Solution.

The solu­tion has three components:

1)      Chan­nel Mea­sure­ment and Opti­miza­tion – Sta­tis­tics for a chan­nel and videos of a chan­nel (not just your own chan­nel… hint hint!) are down­loaded from the YouTube API and inserted into Site­Cat­a­lyst and/or Insight.   Although this data is avail­able through YouTube’s report­ing, we have found that our clients don’t want to have to log into mul­ti­ple report­ing sys­tems to com­pile their reports.  Hav­ing all of the data in one place saves time and allows for the dis­cov­ery of cor­re­la­tions between your YouTube and site data.    

 

2)      Engage­ment – Is YouTube influ­en­tial in the con­ver­sion process?  Does the YouTube chan­nel make an effec­tive land­ing page?  How can I drive more traf­fic from my YouTube chan­nel to my site in the hopes that they will con­vert?  These are all ques­tions that our clients are answer­ing with this inte­gra­tion.  This is accom­plished with a track­ing pixel added to the YouTube Chan­nel which allows us to con­nect YouTube vis­i­tors (or Face­book or MySpace for that mat­ter) to vis­i­tors on your site.  You can now under­stand how vis­i­tors are inter­act­ing with your mul­ti­ple online properties.

 

3)      Chan­nel Video Opti­miza­tion– YouTube offers the abil­ity to upload a cus­tom player to the YouTube chan­nel.  That cus­tom player can include our Video Mea­sure­ment library (Action­Source) which gives access to all of our stan­dard video reports.  This allows the mar­keter to tie spe­cific videos to other con­ver­sion events.

Thanks to Omniture’s Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices for host­ing and main­tain the solu­tion that inter­faces with YouTube’s API.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post where we dis­cuss com­mon busi­ness ques­tions regard­ing your YouTube Chan­nel along with some sam­ple reports.  If you have any ques­tions regard­ing this inte­gra­tion please con­tact your Account Manager.