Another interesting piece of the Recent FreeWheel Video Monetization Report for Q1 2012 was the number of ads viewed in the quarter. Generally, after the major shopping season (read the holidays) winds down a lot of industries will move toward a slump of inactivity. But that wasn’t quite the case with online video advertising.

The first quarter of the year is horribly slow in the video game industry as an example, to the point where some days the news takes all of 15 minutes. It’s a common theme in the post-holiday quarter after the furious running about the country does toward Christmas.

Digital Video Ad Loads in Q1 2012 Match Q4 2011

However, even the historical first-quarter slump seems to have been erased this year according to FreeWheel and the report states that Q1 2012 video ads per video viewed over time were almost exactly the same as Q4 2011 and steady with Q4 2010. Now, the other quarters did show a ramping up trend with ad spending generally lowest in Q1 and steadily increasing until Q4, but this time, the cycle was broken.

According to the report this was due to advertisers still buying ad inventory in the digital video realm, an act which they extrapolated to mean an increased buy in for advertisers in online video advertising.

Why No Seasonal Dippity Do?

I’ve been pondering reasons why this might be happening. So I dug out the comScore Video Metrix numbers for the past few months. The numbers for November of 2011 are incomplete because comScore was using different metrics then, but you still get the basics of what happened through much of Q4 2011 and across Q1 2012.

As you can see from my chart below, the number of videos consumed went up and stayed steady through Q1 2012. Now remember, comScore says each segment of a piece of video content is counted as a video so long as three seconds are played. That means a single TV show with two ad breaks in it creates three ‘videos’ in their tally. The other trends are equally interesting though, the minutes per viewer went up from November to January and then remained fairly steady. There’s actually a very slight drop in Jan-Mar but it’s still far above 2011. The number of unique viewers peaked in January but even February’s lower 179M is 8M more than December 2011 and 10M more than November.

So with that kind of online video audience, it makes sense that Q1 2012 did not see a dip in video advertising online. Clearly, the audience was there and was viewing a goodly amount of video content. So even though the retailer ‘busy season’ might have ended, there were still a lot of advertisers who saw value in continuing ad spend in Q1 because of these numbers or perhaps because of how they bought their ads.

Either way, it shows that the online video advertising industry might be breaking free of the more traditional seasonality of television and other industries. That also is logical to me, after all, video consumers want the content whenever and wherever, correct? That’s the whole point of getting our video content online, we can get it on our own schedule.

Read more at: Online Video Advertising Immune to Seasonal Fluctuations? [Research] from ReelSEO Online Video Marketing Digest

Comscore just released a study of online video engagement in Germany, and the results are a continuing testament to the growth of online video outside of the United States.  46.9 million German Internet users went to online video in March, a 2.3% increase from last year.  More importantly, the average time German users spent watching online video increased over 33%.  So the country is watching more and staying around more, which is good news for online video destinations around the world as the advertising model has been a blazing hot topic this year.

Comscore Results For Germany Show Remarkable Growth

Here’s a look at the graph from Comscore.  Some of it is obviously in German, but as always, “Google Sites” leads the charge:

A pretty interesting note from Social Barrel points out that the video game channels are the most popular, and Bigpoint is top dog in Germany, gathering 5.6 million viewers, beating out one of the top channels, period, Machinima, which saw 4.2 million in the country.  Bigpoint’s viewership has grown over 80% since October.  Amazing.

The Social Barrel article quotes Comscore senior account manager Peter Bern Schneider concerning YouTube’s presence in Germany.  What it boils down to is that in the US and England, brands are using YouTube to attract audiences, and hopefully, customers, but in Germany it’s not as prevalent.  That’s why seeing a graph like this is so important, because advertisers can see how many people watch online video and better concentrate their efforts.

Here’s a part of Schneider’s quote concerning brands on YouTube:

It seems that the potential of YouTube channels in German-speaking countries are not fully utilized, but with the new metrics that are available now, can change that quickly.

Absolutely.  Another thing this shows (again) is that online video reaches a worldwide audience, and the potential customers that are out there are vast.  It’s a reminder not to concentrate solely on English-speaking regions of the world.

Read more at: Online Video Explodes In Germany from ReelSEO Online Video Marketing Digest

Holy mackerel! That’s a whole lotta online video ads man! In fact, it’s actually 20% of all videos viewed online roughly. That is if you remember that those ads are actually intersecting pieces of video content which then gets tallied as multiple videos by comScore. So really, it’s quite possible that there were really just 9.5 billion videos that were chopped up into four pieces by the 9.5 billion video ads. Yeah, my head hurts now too. It’s like trying to understand the motivations of Cthulhu.

Alright, elder gods aside, April was another big month for online video all around. It was 181 million people who watched almost 37 billion video segments on top of those 9.5 billion ads. Google once again remained at the top of the list and Yahoo! showed the staying power of its new video initiative by once again staving off VEVO for second. Microsoft jumped up to fifth place knocking Viacom, AOL and the others down a peg. Turner dropped off the top ten chart altogether as did NBCU replaced by newcomers Amazon and News Distribution Network Inc which offers a video wire service for news agencies.

Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties Ranked by Unique Video Viewers April 2012 Total U.S. – Home and Work Locations Content Videos Only (Ad Videos Not Included) Source: comScore Video Metrix
Property	Total Unique Viewers (000)	Videos (000)*	Minutes per Viewer
Total Internet : Total Audience	180,785	36,848,001	1,307.7
Google Sites	157,663	17,022,226	434.8
Yahoo! Sites	53,604	741,995	73.7
VEVO	49,479	674,183	57.9
Facebook.com	44,298	264,903	27.0
Microsoft Sites	42,833	486,567	42.4
Viacom Digital	41,247	501,100	58.9
AOL, Inc.	38,925	496,400	54.3
Amazon Sites	30,168	104,581	17.4
Hulu	28,233	901,060	228.5
News Distribution Network, Inc.	27,005	186,956	75.2

*A video is defined as any streamed segment of audiovisual content, including both progressive downloads and live streams. For long-form, segmented content, (e.g. television episodes with ad pods in the middle) each segment of the content is counted as a distinct video stream.

Video Advertising Gets a Billion View Bump

Wow, in march video ads totaled just under 8.4 billion and this month just under 9.5 billion. that’s a pretty big one month jump. Just CBS Interactive dropped off the list this month and was replaced by SpotXchange. Hulu lost almost 150 million video ad views on the month, 50 million of which showed up at Google, or at least, they grew theirs that much. Brightroll, Adap.tv, ESPN, Tremor, Specific all lost views. It’s OK though because TubeMogul put on the gloves and pulled in 300 million extra, Auditude got a bit of a bump and SpotXchange really crushed it, not making the March list and coming in sixth this month means they added some 250 million ad views at a minimum.

I just spoke with Tod Sacerdoti from Brightroll this week about some other stuff, including how they maintain their low frequency and massive reach. But that doesn’t affect my opinion one way or another on where to put your video ads.

It could be that because of the growth of long form content and the rise of the mid-roll, there are simply more opportunities for video ads. The average length of online video content has been steadily climbing of late but held steady at 6.4 minutes in April. Video Ads are still averaging 0.4 minutes, or 24 seconds which show there are probably slightly more 30-second spots than there are 15-second because the mean would be 22.5 seconds. Also, the amount of ads to videos is on the rise which I don’t like.

• February 2012 – 16.6 percent of all videos viewed and 1.3 percent of all minutes
• March 2012 – 18.5 percent of all videos viewed and 1.5 percent of all minutes
• April 2012 – 20.5 percent of all videos viewed and 1.6 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

Compare that to TV ads and you’ll see it’s getting dangerously close to the same rate and that could have a detrimental affect on viewing eventually.

• 2004 – 30 percent
• 2006 – 30 percent
• 2007 – 30 percent
• 2008 – 32 percent
• 2009 – 30 percent
• 2010 – 32 percent
• 2011 – 31 percent

Chris` Recommendations on Video Ad Placement

As always, I like to rank the ad networks my most favorable environment for advertisers. I do that by using the comScore numbers to find the highest reach, lowest frequency video ad network because, if I were advertising somewhere, it’s what I would want.

Both Brightroll and Specific Media lost some reach this month and that narrowed the gap between them. The prior has a higher reach while the latter has a lower frequency so it’s a close call this month and it’s three points in each category. Weird. I have to stick with Brightroll though because even though they lost some reach the show almost a billion video ads a month and maintain a sub-10 frequency, so they’re still the number one video ad network in my ranking with 33.8% reach, 9.1 frequency and the second-most total ad minutes. Very, very close behind them this month ins Specific Media who only have about 66% of the video ads shown but still have 30.9% reach and an astounding 6.9 frequency – well done!

Third place has traditionally been a tricky pick and this month is no different. Google has a good reach with 24.3% but so does Adap.tv with 22.5 (they were third last month). They edged out Google last month because of a much lower frequency, fourth lowest overall in fact. So Adap.tv once again wins third place. If Auditude could really boost its reach, it could make a run at third place in my ratings so long as it kept its third-lowest frequency as well.

Top U.S. Online Video Ad Properties Ranked by Video Ads* Viewed April 2012 Total U.S. – Home and Work Locations Ad Videos Only (Content Videos Not Included) Source: comScore Video Metrix
Property	Video Ads (000)	Total Ad Minutes (MM)	Frequency (Ads per Viewer)	% Reach Total U.S. Population
Total Internet : Total Audience	9,478,975	3,937	59.8	51.7
Hulu	1,597,166	670	48.6	10.7
Google Sites	1,319,342	136	17.7	24.3
BrightRoll Video Network**1	942,899	566	9.1	33.8
Adap.tv†3	880,522	525	12.7	22.5
TubeMogul Video Ad Platform**	830,621	230	17.1	15.9
SpotXchange Video Ad Marketplace**	666,588	367	12.8	17.0
Tremor Video**	661,727	360	13.2	16.3
Specific Media**2	650,578	314	6.9	30.9
ESPN	514,347	189	26.6	6.3
Auditude, Inc.**	511,278	202	11.3	14.8

*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, etc.
**Indicates video ad network
†Indicates video ad exchange
Bold and numbered represent my personal ratings

YouTube Partner Channels

Not much to say about the YouTube Partner channel numbers really. Warner Bros. and Schmooru disappeared and were replaced by Demand Media and IGN. With E3 coming fast the video game channels are going to seriously heat up and I bet come the May/June numbers we’ll see IGN and a few others climb the charts.

Top YouTube Partner Channels* Ranked by Unique Video Viewers April 2012 Total U.S. – Home and Work Locations Content Videos Only (Ad Videos Not Included) Source: comScore Video Metrix
Property	Total Unique Viewers (000)	Videos (000)	Minutes per Viewer
VEVO @ YouTube	48,307	644,111	56.7
Warner Music @ Youtube	28,632	177,251	25.0
Machinima @ YouTube	23,146	382,360	65.0
Maker Studios Inc. @ YouTube	15,353	165,485	43.9
FullScreen @ YouTube	12,331	58,994	18.1
BroadbandTV @ YouTube	8,218	38,245	17.2
Big Frame @ YouTube	7,266	41,647	20.3
Demand Media @ YouTube	6,321	15,622	8.1
Clevvertv @ YouTube	6,076	12,541	7.6
IGN @ YouTube	5,933	30,663	16.8

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include claimed user-generated content

Other notable findings from April 2012 include:

• 84.5 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The duration of the average online content video was 6.4 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
• Video ads accounted for 20.5 percent of all videos viewed and 1.6 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

Read more at: April is Another Record-Breaking Month for Video Advertising: 9.5 Billion Online Video Ads Served from ReelSEO Online Video Marketing Digest

Today marks a significant day for social media and investors around the world as Facebook begins trading shares publicly. At 11am Eastern Time (4pm UK time) the social network will await its historic initial public offering (IPO) as shares will be available  on the Nasdaq Stock Market at the price of $ 38, valuing the company [...]

Read more at: What Does Facebook’s IPO Mean For Users? from Ben Norman’s Seo Blog

Posted by HunterW

Disclaimer: I am neither a lawyer nor have I ever played one on TV. This article should not be taken as gospel nor should you rely upon the items in this article as an absolute way to protect yourself. ALWAYS have a lawyer review your client services agreement and all other documents. Ok – now on to the show.

I’ve been running my business full-time now for nearly 3.5 years and the one thing I’ve learned is this: put everything down in writing. This way there is no confusion about what’s to be expected. My contract is constantly evolving as I gain more and more experience (and learning lessons – often the hard way). Please note, I’m not giving you the actual legalese I use in my contract, I’m just giving you a description of each section. Here are the different sections I have in my contract:

Deliverables

Explain what you’re going to deliver to the client. Are you going to write five blog articles a month? Put it in the contract. Over the course of the contract, are you going to utilize microsites? Put it in the contract. Are you going to analyze 250 keywords? Put it in the contract. Give something measurable to the client so he feels comfortable writing you a check every month.

Billing term

What is the length of your contract? Is it a one-time project? A three-month trial period? For 12 months? Put a start date into the contract along with a tangible term to avoid confusion.

Basis for Early Cancellation

You always want a way to escape a bad situation – and the client wants the same. I had a nightmare client once that would call me every day (even on Thanksgiving Day) to ask why he wasn’t seeing dramatic improvement in his rankings yet. No matter how many times I told him that SEO wasn’t a quick fix and that it took time, he never listened. He’d continue to call day after day – usually taking 20-60 minutes of my time. This section gives both of us reasons to terminate our contact. My current “opt-out” clauses are:

• Any reason with 60-day written notice. The “fee” to opt-out early is either three months of the monthly fee or payment for the remainder of the contract, whichever is less.
   
• Mutual Termination. If both of us agree it isn’t a good fit we can each walk away without a penalty. I invoked this clause with my nightmare client and he was happy to oblige.
   
• Failure on my part to fulfill the agreement. If I fail to uphold my end of the contract (mainly the deliverables) then the client can notify me in writing that he wishes to terminate the contract. I then have 30 days to remedy the situation. If I don’t, the contract is cancelled and no early termination fees are required.
   
• Unauthorized Administrative Access. If an unauthorized person goes into the website and essentially “undoes” all that I’ve done, I can terminate the contract. The client is liable for the early termination fee.
   
• Insolvency. If my company goes belly-up or if the client’s company goes belly-up, the contract is terminated and no fees are due.
   
• Default. If the client doesn’t pay then the contract is terminated. Later in the contract I break down what defines “default.”

Non-Disclosure by Both Parties

You’re going to get an intimate look at the client’s business and she’ll get an intimate look at yours too. Both of you agree to keep one another’s secrets secret.

Limited Liability Waiver

This one is really important if you’re working with big clients. This clause ensures you’re protected from all losses incurred by your client as a result of your work. The only thing she can recover is the money paid to you. If you stick with white hat techniques you should be fine. But would you want to be financially responsible if your client takes a hit like the one taken by JC Penny or Overstock.com?

Waiver Protection

Basically this section says that if one of us waives one section of this agreement during the course of our relationship it doesn’t waive the entire contract.

Severability

This says that if one section of this agreement is found to be unenforceable (due to changes in the law, different laws in different states or any other reason) then only that section is suspended. All others remain in place.

Force Majeure

This is also known as “The Act of God” clause. If something out of your control or out of your client’s control happens then you’ll suspend the contract for the duration of the event. An example of this is when your client’s office gets hit by lightening and they have to shut down for four weeks while they wait for repairs to be completed. You’ll simply suspend the contract and then restart once they’re back up and running. Another example, though not exactly “God,” is a piece of legislation. Let’s say your client was a manufacturer of incandescent light bulbs. Congress has said that these can no longer be manufactured and your client is now out of business due to government intervention. This clause allows them to suspend the contract indefinitely.

Miscellaneous

This is where I put everything else that doesn’t have a fancy legal term. In this section I have a “Good Faith” clause (we’ll both work with one another to find a good solution), “Governing Law” (I live and work in Colorado so Colorado law applies), “Right to Arbitration” (we’ll go to arbitration before going to court) and an “Email and Electronic Records Consent” (the client allows me to email documents to him and add him to my email list).

Mutual Linking

I only apply this for my web design clients. If I’ve designed their site then they’ll keep the link back to my website on their site.

Hours of Operation

List out your hours. You may work different ones but this spells out when the client should contact you.

Holiday Schedule

Let your clients know when you aren’t going to be around. I list mine out and even say, “Other holidays as determined by Webstore Solutions, LLC” in case I decide to do something wild and crazy on Arbor Day.

Hourly Rate for Work Outside of Business Hours

I’m willing to work on Christmas Day for a client if it’s an emergency but he’s going to make it worth it for me.

Pricing

Make it plain as day what price is.

Payment Terms

Make sure it’s clear if it’s one time, monthly, quarterly… whatever the case may be. Also, is payment due immediately? Net 15? Net 30? Make sure that is clear. I already have this in the contract but I spell it out again to make sure it’s clear. The penalties for late payment are also spelled out.

Automatic Renewal and Price Assurance

This is a clause that I’ve not added yet but I’m kicking the idea around. Basically if the client doesn’t cancel at the end of the term, the contract automatically renews for the same term. Pricing won’t be more than 10% higher than the previous contract. As my business has started to grow, I’ve started raising prices to get rid of the less profitable types of clients. I recently doubled the price of my entry-level SEO offering and lost some clients. This clause will, in theory, save me time from having to resell them, give me a revenue source for 12 more months, and give my clients a lower price even if the published rate increases.

Signature and Date

Make sure you have a spot for both parties.

Contract Version Number

This is at the footer of every page. Every time I make an update, I change the version number and save a copy of the old version. This way I know which client is on which version.
 

One final word of caution: courts favor the party who did not write the contract for any ambiguous phrasing or details. That’s why I stress the importance of hiring a lawyer to draft or review the contract you’ve written.

Good luck! Please leave your comments on any sections you have in your contract that aren’t addressed in mine. In the meantime, be sure to check out these past SEOmoz posts about contract clauses:

• Manage Risk By Including an Indemnification Clause in Your SEO Consulting Contracts
• Does Your SEO Consulting Contract Have a Clause Limiting Your Liability?
• Why You Should Give Yourself the "Opportunity to Cure" in Your SEO Consulting Contracts

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Read more at: Must-Have Items for Your Client Contract from SEOmoz User Generated SEO Blog

Calls-to-action should be something fun or stir people to react to your videos, to become involved.  When you allow your fans to interact with you in some way, you give them a challenge or a question to tackle, and you provide your own input into those fan interactions, you begin to develop a relationship with your fans.  Your fans care and spread the word, and you get valuable feedback.  For awhile, Film Riot did this by having the occasional, now weekly, “Mail Sack” video, where host Ryan Connolly would answer questions presented by viewers.  But now, they’ve taken it to another level through engaging with their audience and issuing a call-to-action, interactive challenge.

Film Riot’s Monday Challenge: Interactive Audience Engagment

Film Riot kicked off their Monday Challenge with this episode on April 23.  Ryan called for people to send in a video depicting a “head shot.”  If you want to go straight to the call-to-action, it’s at 7:11:

Click here to watch this video.

Notice that the rules for the challenge are explicitly stated.  How long the video needs to be, the goals of the video, where to send it, the deadline.  What’s great about a call-to-action such as this is that it calls for people to do things that the show Film Riot has been doing for years, and I think this is the telling comment from Connolly:

Basically the idea behind this is, since the beginning of Film Riot, we have been motivated by you guys to constantly be producing something new, doing all these little sketches and short films and it is really refined and honed our skills over time.  So, we thought we could do the same for you guys, offer out these Monday Challenges so you guys could possibly have a chance to get on the show, have your work shown, and motivate you to start bettering your craft.

So it’s a challenge that is not only fun, but could possibly get your work shown, and gives you practice all at once.  Here’s what made the show on the following Monday (at 5:27):

Click here to watch this video.

Film Riot makes this a self-perpetuating machine by announcing the next challenge right after showing all the winners.  The other thing that is really cool, and this is something that Connolly brings up, is that this challenge, with people uploading videos to YouTube, has created a nice little community of people who critique and comment on all the videos submitted.  So even the ones that don’t get chosen end up getting feedback.

Here are the winners of the push-pull challenge, or the Vertigo Shot (at 5:29):

Click here to watch this video.

And then winners of the cloning effect (at 4:30):

Click here to watch this video.

The next one is three-point lighting, following a script written by Connolly.  You see how it goes.  These are all special techniques that get people out and experimenting with the camera or special effects program in some way.  And what a great way to build a rabid audience.  Those looking for unique calls-to-action should look for inspiration here.

Read more at: Film Riot’s Monday Challenge: A Great Example of Interactive Audience Engagement in Video from ReelSEO Online Video Marketing Digest

iYogi Insights just put out some research in regards to the effectiveness of the Freemium business model and I combed through it and pulled out all the bits that had to do with online video for you. There’s loads of other info available as well if you want to read the Consumer Adoption Of Freemium Products And Services research. Hulu is probably the world’s largest freemium site in the realm of online video but even they are considering the evil plan of requiring pay TV subscriptions soon (BOO!!!). Perhaps this research might show them that is a very, very bad idea.

Freemium Content Models and the Power of Video

First, what is Freemium?  Wikipedia states;

“Freemium is a business model by which a product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but a premium is charged for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services. The word ‘freemium’ is aportmanteau combining the two aspects of the business model: ‘free’ and ‘premium’.”

Conversion rates for movies and video online using a freemium model ranged from 57 to 65%. That’s a pretty large chunk of consumers for sites like Netflix and Hulu (both included in this survey). Even video/images sharing services saw a decent 24% conversion rate at places like Flickr and Shutterfly. Overall iYogi found that the conversion rate was 42%. So, while the sharing sites didn’t do extremely well, considering YouTube is totally free it’s no surprise, the freemium model was far more impressive for movies/TV/video topping the average by 15% or more.

The research mentioned that “if it can’t be sold for free, it can’t be sold at all,” in terms of using freemium as a way for brands to check receptiveness and increase conversions. Some think it odd that sales would see a jump after letting users in for free but it makes sense. Video games have done it for ages, offering a small demo of a game for players to get a taste of the action and hooking them in. There was some debate about the effectiveness of game demos some time back because it seems like they don’t have a very well-oiled research industry in place.

For me, it works. If I get a game demo and I like it, I’m more likely to pick up the game at a later date. Plopping down a stack of cash for a game which I haven’t played at all is hard. That’s what makes game rental services so good for gamers. You can get the game, try it out and then decide if you want to shell out for the full game.

I imagine it works well for Hulu also. Get people used to viewing some TV content online but don’t offer the latest, or an entire season for free… No, no couch potato, you need to pay for Hulu Plus to access every last juicy bit of the latest season of Desperate Housewives.

Read more at: Video Generates Highest Conversion Rates Among Freemium Content Marketing Models [Research] from ReelSEO Online Video Marketing Digest

In this week’s Creator’s Tip video, we talk to Nathan Engels, the creator of www.WeUseCoupons.com and contributor to TLC’s Extreme Couponing series.  Nathan gives us his insights to the benefits of video for promoting your site or blog and how online video, and YouTube, have been an integral and important piece for developing and growing their social media marketing strategy.

Click here to watch this video.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Nathan Engels or his popular site WeUseCoupons.com, we feel that Nathan is a Social Media Guru Genius.  He has over 100,000 likes on his Facebook page, a hugely successful forum that has 200,000+ visitors and recently started utilizing his YouTube channel to further promote his site.

When Nathan first started out he was interested in video and YouTube but was only utilizing it as a place to hold all his videos he wanted to share through his blog.  He has since come to realize the power that YouTube can have for bloggers, people in social media or just regular businesses trying to promote their website or grow their social media presence.  People online are looking to engage and feel a connection.  Videos provides a personal touch that can’t quite be reached with just the use of words and photos alone.    As Nathan puts it,

“We say pictures are worth a thousand words, well videos are literally worth a million because you can see the person, feel the person adn you can sense them through online video…”

He goes on to say that watching a short video gets viewers personally invested in you to the point where they will start to look forward to future videos you put out as they become a loyal follower and reader.

QUESTION:   Do you think that video is an integral part of any social media marketing strategy? How has video affected your social media presence?

Read more at: Your Social Media Marketing Strategy isn’t Complete w/o Video [Creator's Tip #39] from ReelSEO Online Video Marketing Digest

Posted by Neal Cabage

Many websites have Google Analytics setup, but the majority are not making the most use of these resources. Often, analytics is an afterthought or is dismissed as merely a way of tracking the number of visitors on a given day. But there is so much more actionable data to be had with a little time and forethought.

In this post, I am going to talk a bit about analytics strategy and then provide examples of actionable data that can be tracked and how it might be useful.

Strategy

At a very high level, start by considering the goals of your site and how those map to your analytics tracking. Most eCommerce and Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses, for example, want to generate a purchase transaction. Services businesses such as consultancies may be looking to generate higher funnel leads that will eventually lead to contract for service offline, at a later time. Still others, such as news content sites, might define a goal as keeping a user on the site for a minimum amount of time or having them return a specified number of times within a month. Whatever your goals are, it is imperative to define those clearly – ideally before you even create your website, but certainly before setting up an analytics campaign.

Each of the above goals is possible to track using custom events, goals, events, and funnel tracking in Google Analytics. There's even a way to setup custom widgets on the dashboard and have reports and alerts emailed to you on a schedule as well, making it easier than ever to access highly meaningful performance metrics. There really is no excuse to still be using a tool as powerful as Google Analytics to merely track your page views day-to-day.

Define Your Goals

What should we be tracking? Let's take an eCommerce site as an example, since it has the most sophisticated and well-defined conversion funnel, and we'll demonstrate the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at each major step of the funnel that we might consider tracking. This should give a good idea of what's possible and get the creative juices flowing a bit. There are three major steps to the typical eCommerce funnel with an optional fourth step. Let's walk through each one:

i. Acquisition

We start by looking at how traffic was acquired. How were users sent to your website and from where? Although you may never attain 100% visibility, you'd be surprised just how much visibility you can achieve. You probably already know this through the standard analytics reports: that you can see keywords that were searched and on which search engine. Google also makes it very easy to integrate AdWords data to see exactly which AdWords campaigns are generating traffic and which are converting. Google also owns Feedburner, which provides yet another trackable channel for which you can directly attribute traffic.

Tagging is possible for anything outside of the Google-sphere, making it possible to add (utm) tags to the querystring of any URL you embed into an email campaign, social campaign, or banner marketing campaign. For many people, that's the point where the light really goes on, realizing that you can tag and thus achieve almost complete visibility of traffic sourcing, and factor all of this into your integrated analytics campaigns.

An example of using UTM tags to track external click events:

http://www.site.com/myproduct/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=300×250-banner&utm_campaign=myproduct

With all of these tactical tracking opportunities in mind, imagine the possibilities. Here are just a few examples of valuable KPI data points you might consider tracking as part of acquisition:

• Organic Search (SEO)
• Paid Search Marketing (SEM)
• Social Campaigns
• Banner Campaigns
• Links from External Sites
• Links from Online Videos
• Email Recipients
• RSS Subscribers

ii. Engagement

Once you've got the attention of your users, are you effectively driving that traffic toward your funnel or toward micro-conversion events that help to keep them engaged? Even if the visitor does not purchase something today, it can still be extremely useful to capture an email address, get them to subscribe to an RSS feed, or any number of other activities that will keep the communication channels open and continue to educate and qualify them in preparation for a later purchase. This is particularly true of larger purchases or services, which require longer time for transactions to mature.

To begin thinking of KPI data points in the engagement segment of the funnel, consider what sort of user activities you could be implementing and the corresponding micro-conversion goals you could be setting. This may also help you realize that you could be doing more to engage your users. Here are a few examples of good engagement goals to track:

• Account signup
• Email signup
• RSS subscription
• Saving product to wishlists
• Adding item(s) to cart
• Contributing product ratings or reviews
• Watching video
• Content interactions (e.g. photo zoom, faceted search attributes, etc.)

iii. Conversion

You've made it from acquiring to engaging, and now you're finally converting that prospect into a paying customer. This is the point at which you're finally able to attribute cost and value to all of your efforts and begin making some decisions.

If you're spending money on paid search campaigns, you can see the precise value of each ad campaign, if you've integrated conversion tracking. You'll also be able to see percentage of conversions for other non-integrated channels such as SEO, social, and banner re-targeting. Plus, other details such as average order value and average time to complete a purchase, and you can segment those macro statics by channel to derive insights such as paid search converts with better velocity than social.

The KPIs to consider tracking at this funnel step are:

• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Return on investment (SEO, Social)
• Revenue
• Average order value
• Average time to complete order
• Average visits before conversion

     * Consider segmenting all of these KPIs by ad channel

iv. Loyalty

All of the above analysis can be very valuable, but is a bit myopic if take in isolation, particularly if you have return visitors or a more sophisticated sales and marketing operation that involves multiple touches prior to conversion.

Consider the more complex scenario of a prospect who visits your site, then sees retargeted banners on other sites (reminding them of you), so they sign up for your newsletter and eventually convert into a customer. And what if they come back a second or third time thereafter and purchase again. How do you attribute the sales? Does it all get attributed back to the 'first touch' interaction with one of your ads?

The new version of Google Analytics (v5) introduces the idea of a multi-channel funnel, which helps to address this issue. With a series of new reports, you can finally see which touch triggered the transaction, but you can also see the path and which other touch points may have assisted with that transaction. This can go a long way toward helping to understand the less tangible value of the early-stage-funnel 'assist' campaigns. For example, the social channel has notoriously low direct conversion attribution… But with multi-channel attribution, you can finally begin to see its role in setting up other activities later down the funnel to trigger a transaction.

Putting it all together

Hopefully, you are seeing the sort of user behavior and ad campaign performance insights you can mine from Google Analytics, if you take the time to define a strategy and properly implement the tracking and reporting. And that really is the key take away: analytics is a powerful tool that will provide substantial actionable data and enable you to make much smarter marketing budget decisions; but it requires clarity for your goals and how you drive traffic and engage your users. Without that clarity, you do not have a road map to setup a meaningful analytics campaign. Clarity and discipline is where many businesses get stuck and why so few practice meaningful analytics, outside of the major enterprise. But if you have clarity around your traffic generation and engagement activities and goals, you can generate highly informative and actionable data to super charge your marketing efforts, and that is a real competitive advantage.

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Read more at: Actionable Ideas for an Effective Analytics Strategy from SEOmoz User Generated SEO Blog

It’s taken awhile for Google-owned YouTube and Google-owned Google+ to get the two married properly.  A few months ago, Google+ didn’t even have YouTube integration and all of us wondered why two properties owned by the same company wasn’t on the ball with that.  Then finally, they did integrate the two, where you could share all sorts of videos and playlists.  But despite that, on YouTube itself, you couldn’t just click a button like you could with Facebook and Twitter.  And now today, YouTube announced the Google+ Share button.

The Google+ Share Button: What Took These Guys So Long?

When I read this, it seemed such a simplistic thing.  How in the world did they not get to this sooner?  Here it is, in all its glory:

This was either an oversight, since you could share videos using Google+ and no one really noticed that there wasn’t a click-of-the-button kind of deal, or there was some other problem that only those in Google know about.

It also looks like they have replaced the +1 thing, where you could “Google Like” something without sharing the video.  I’m supposing they got backlash on the idea that +1′s were going to take over on the site.  Pressing “Like” on a YouTube video gives you the chance to share it with the three big social networks.

Right now it appears there’s a huge emphasis on sharing, on keeping the “Likes” specific to YouTube and not confusing the matter with +1′s.  But this of course upsets some people like any change.  A few people in the comments on YouTube’s Google+ page thought it would be better to be able to convert likes into +1′s for those who have Google+.  No doubt Google isn’t done with any of this, they tinker mercilessly, so this isn’t the last word we’ll be seeing on this.

Read more at: YouTube Finally Adds Google+ Share Button? What The Heck? from ReelSEO Online Video Marketing Digest