You’ve got a metrics solution for Web pages. It might be Google Analytics or it might be something else, but you can count your page views, your visitors, and your conversions on your Web site. But as your marketing increasingly happens off your site and out of sight, you need more metrics solutions to track your progress. This week, YouTube has stepped up with a nice offering to help you track your video marketing.
See, metrics hasn’t always been simple. We use lots of weird terms like “page views” and “referrals” just to make sure that normal human beings don’t know what we’re talking about. As I said in my proposal for simple Web metrics a while back, all marketers really want to measure is
- Did they see it?
- Did they choose it?
- Did they do it?
That’s all well and good when the message is on your Web site. You know whether they saw it by using you Web metrics package. And it’s great when your message is trying to lead someone to a sale. You can find out if they bought something.
But more and more, we’re seeing viral marketing focused on brand awareness. And those viral messages are not usually passed on your site. That’s why Web metrics is getting a bit more complicated. Just as you need DoubleClick to tell you whether a banner ad ran, you need Feedburner to tell you how many blog subscribers you have.
So, YouTube is now filling the void for video. It was great that we could upload videos to YouTube for free. Lots of folks watched our videos, but we didn’t know much about them. We knew the total number of people that watched, but we didn’t know when they watched, where they were from, and how popular your video was. If you use YouTube, check out their announcement of YouTube Insight.
