10e20 Blog

Have you ever wondered how videos show up in web search engine results? How do videos get hundreds of thousands to millions of views on YouTube? Who’s watching my videos? Well, with a little hard work on optimizing and networking your video content and a helpful tool called YouTube Insight, you can be on your way to working with video and optimizing it for real business results.

YouTube Insight is a handy analytics tool that displays statistics for YouTube Videos. By using Insight you’ll discover statistics such as:

• how many views your video has over specific periods of time,
• the demographic and geographic breakouts of the views and
• how people are finding the video content (web search, YouTube search, embed, etc…)

Though Insight’s data is not always 100% accurate (YouTube states this when you are working with it) and can use some further development in features and functionality, it’s a great start to gaining “insight” to this ever so important media.

I get angry when I see companies buy pricey media such as print, television, radio or outdoor and they don’t take advantage to tie that media buy to the web in an effective way. What do I mean by this?

Take for example a large billboard on the side of the highway that has a message about a specific offer from a company, and the only web address displayed is the company’s main domain name eg, www.company.com I feel that this is a wasted advertising opportunity to have just your main domain name listed. Much in the same way Danielle pointed out when off-line link-bait is often not leveraged properly on-line, targeted messages, spaces, interactivity and landing pages should be created and matched on-line for off-line media buys.

I believe that every advertising buy should have a targeted message behind it and accordingly specific media creatives and goals to go along with it.

Many important decisions begin with analysis of website statistics. Statistics packages can give a website owner a different perspective and allow him/her to get more insight into visitors’ behaviors, habits, and the key terms that bring people to the website. Key marketing and business decisions can be founded on website statistics analysis. Once your website is up and you’re looking for traffic, all users should consider a statistics package.

Fortunately, in this day and age, you can find just about everything for a relatively cheap price or even free. There just so happens to be a plethora of statistics packages available, and while the free options aren’t necessarily as comprehensive as the paid statistics software applications, they are worth noting. With Gatineau around the corner (and we can still anticipate its launch), there are other free analytics applications that you should consider using on your site. Here are a list of six that you might want to look into if you are looking for statistics. I have written this guide with a basic overview of each.

I love mashups. I love tools that combine two great things into one very cool thing. Widgets might be the defining technology in 2007, but mashups — despite their apparent prevalence in our Web 2.0 world — will continue to pop up and astound me.

With that, I introduce what I just discovered: Delexa. Delexa is a domain-ranking engine that allows you to see information on the top 50,000 websites (ranked by Alexa) and their topic tags (ranked by del.icio.us). The result is pretty cool:

If you search for the top SEO sites, you see 100 websites grouped into three columns: a Delexa ranking, the Alexa rating, and the number of tags that reference the particular website. For business research, this is a pretty neat tool to get an idea of where you should look (whether for competitors or for related resources) and how they are ranked in a very friendly and usable format.

One of my biggest problems with Google Analytics has always been that you can’t get the full referring URL of where someone came from. For example – if you someone came from http://www.domain.com/referring-exact-page.php – it just shows up in Analytics as http://www.domain.com – which only gives you half the story. I want to be able to track down the exact place if neccessary – not have to hunt through a site to find the page.

Luckily Reuben Yau has come up with a hack that integrates the Urchin Tracker Script, which is usually used for tracking javascript or Flash events. It takes all of 1 minute to install and seems to be working great. If you’re a Google Analytics user and want full referring URLs – check out the fix at Reuben’s blog.