New YouTube Analytics Help Design Book Trailers!

YouTube is doing so many new things that it is hard to keep up! But, we have and now we’re going to share with you.

You’ll notice, when you go to www.youtube.com/booktrailers and click on one of our videos that the player can be seen in widescreen! This is new and so far we’re loving it!

I noticed on some other channels that YouTube is gearing up not only for lower third pre-role but for in-video ads to the right side of a video as well. That seems to be in alpha right now since I’ve not heard any rumblings from beta testers, but I see the writing on the wall.

YouTube will now let you buy ad space and get your video or channel featured. It is very much like Google AdWords and is run by Google.

YouTube has analytics called “Insight”. It can tell you things like the ages of people who watch a video, their gender, number of views, demographics and now they have something called “Hot Spots”. This is the information YouTube gives regarding this new feature-

“The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length.

Above the average line, your video is hot: it's retaining more viewers than average and they may be rewinding to watch that point again. Below the average line, your video's gone cold: viewers are not rewinding or may be leaving the video faster than the average.”

This is very important information. It lets us know how long someone is staying interested in a video. We can review the information and find out what people like or don’t like with book video. This enables us to build a better video. One with a greater engagement factor, thus allowing for a greater “call to action”.

According to a new survey done by TubeMogul, the attention span of your average online video viewer is very short. According to the TubeMogul study-

“Most videos steadily lose viewers once "play" is clicked, with an average 10.39% of viewers clicking away after ten seconds and 53.56% leaving after one minute.”

Here is the chart they put together that shows how many people continue to watch as a video plays.

According to this study the first 10 seconds of a video is key to get your message in or have something occur that will keep them watching. By one minute half of your viewers have left. Now, they may not be leaving entirely. They may have watched all they needed to in order to make a decision to purchase. But, currently, there’s no tracking system that tells us what they did once they left.

And not all videos are created equally. TubeMogul did not use Hulu.com stats because it is a different environment. There are other exceptions. Notice the Hot Spot analytics for Christine Feehan’s Turbulent Sea video. The video is clearly in the “hot” zone during the entire 2 minutes that the video plays. The majority of COS videos follow this pattern. Since we don’t have access to book videos outside of COS produced videos we don’t know if this is a normal trend for book videos or if it only applies to COS videos. The bottom line is that most COS book videos are being watched to the end. They are the exception to the rule much like Hulu.com is.

As we learn how to best utilize the analytic information we’re collecting we will be able to identify what works best so that we can be consistent in creating videos that are “hot”.