Including Youtube In Your Online Marketing Strategies
Often overlooked by many small to medium sized businesses is the important role that Youtube can play in developing your online marketing strategies. Numbers recently released by Comscore show that Google sites (which includes Youtube) had over 143 unique viewers in the month of March 2011. Consumers are actively using video sites in the process of deciding weather to purchase certain products, services, plan trips, plan events, and much more.
The first thing you should do for your business to create a video presence is setup a Youtube channel. This enables you to group all of your videos together in one place and also provides an area where you can built your brand through Youtube by entering company profile information and customizing some basic design and colour settings.
Once you’ve done this, here are a few additional tips to keep in mind:
Number of Video Views
The element that determines the placement for the relevance of searches of your video is the number of views. This measurement is used over the number of links. What this means is distribution of your video is important in order to increase the number of views. Use outlets such as posting a video to your Facebook page, embedding a video into your website, or encouraging an industry related blog to post your video. By having your video appear on multiple websites with related content, this will inevitably help increase viewership.
Links in the Description
When you add a link to the description field of a Youtube video, it automatically becomes an active, clickable link (must include the http://). However, Youtube adds nofollow to all links in the description field, effectively making the link of no benefit to improving a your site’s search engine ranking. It is still a good strategy though to add links as it does encourage users to click through to your website, especially since the content of the video should be relevant to the content on your website.
Simple Ideas Are Effective
A lot of people think that creating a video for their company is a huge ordeal that involves getting the right lighting, having the right people interviewed, and including the highest quality images and music that enhance their products and services. This does not have to be the case.
As an example, if you are renting out cabins on a lake, how about including a “virtual tour” on your website where you film views of several rooms in the cabin by holding a video camera and slowly rotating around. Embedding a video like this on your website will surely leave a much larger impression about your cabin on potential customers than just a long text description.
Some other examples might be videos that help answer frequently asked questons, like how to start a BBQ, how to setup a tent, or how to change your password on your home security system. Simple videos like these can often be the most effective.
Statistics for your Videos
Youtube provides a whole bunch of statistics on your uploaded videos which they call Insight Statistics. You should monitor these statistics, looking at things like Demographics and Engagements that will help you better understand what your audience is looking for.
With these tips in mind, you will be able to grow your Youtube presence overtime which, in return, will provide a positive benefit for your online marketing strategies as a whole.
Google Analytics vs Woopra
Since Google released its free analytics service, it has been dominating the web analytics market for hosted solutions. However, a few things have been lacking with Google Analytics which has allowed a window of opportunity for new competition to emerge. Enter Woopra.
Just like Google Analytics, Woopra provides a few lines of Javascript code that you add to the bottom of each of your pages which allows for all your web traffic to be recorded remotely. The difference with Woopra is that it uses a Java based program to view all your stats and produces results in real time. Yes!! Real time!!! Nothing has been more frustrating in Google Analytics when you are setting up custom filters and then have to wait until midnight, only to find you forgot a dash, and then have to wait another 24 hours to see if your filter works. With Woopra, when someone hits your website the results are displayed in seconds within their software.
One of the strengths of Woopra is that it makes it pretty easy to look at a visitors history on the site. This can be interesting to see how visitors use your site and what page they go to in what order. This can all be done in Google Analytics too but Woopra makes it really easy.
The one really odd feature that stood out to me was the ability to instant message a visitor who is currently on the site. You can start a conversation with the visitor and then a popup appears within their browser that enables them to chat. I thought this was a bit bizarre and am not sure what the benefit of such a function is. If I was doing something like online banking and a popup came up where the site admin wanted to talk to me, that would freak me right out. But maybe there is a practical use for it, I’m just not sure what it is.
Woopra hasn’t totally converted me as it’s still in beta and has a lot more testing and features to be added, hence I continue to track with Google Analytics as well. With competition on the horizon, it is only a matter of time before Google changes their analytics service to display web stats in real time. It remains to be seen whether Woopra can generate enough long term users to become a viable competitor in the web analytics game.
Add Search Functionality To Your Website with Google
For larger websites with lots of information, it’s always a good idea to include some sort of internal search that searches your site in case your visitors cannot find the information they are looking for. Google’s Custom Search Engine offers a really good solution to adding a section function to your website. If you already have a gmail account, it’s easy to set up and it allows you to choose which URLs you want searched. Once you’ve set it up to search your website, some HTML is provided that contains the <input> field for the search words, which can be pasted into the spot on your site where you want the search to appear.
Google is the Custom Search Engine also provides a snippet to display the results of your search. This allows you to format your results page to fit with your website design and then, simply drop in the Javascript Google provides for the results.
Advertising appears in the right column, however this advertising can be removed by paying $100 / year to Google.
One of the best reasons for setting up a website search using Google is the Custom Search Engine is that it integrates well with Google Analytics. The keywords that your visitors are typing into the search, what pages they’re starting their search from, and what page they are ending up on from their search results are all recorded in Google Analytics. This can offer a lot of insight into visitor behaviour. If a certain search word shows up frequently on this list, it probably means that visitors cannot find the information and may suggest a change to your website is necessary to make it easier to find that content being searched for.
What to Look for in Your Web Stats
Most webmasters are usually analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Web Trends, or ClickTracks to measure the traffic to their websites. But what information is the most useful? The following are a few basic tips to follow:
- The number of visits is important and is best looked at over a monthly basis. You can also segment the number of visitors into time ranges based on campaigns you might be running.
- Determining where your traffic is coming from can be found through the referrers. The list of referrers shows which websites visits reach your site from. Additionally, looking at the bounce rate of each can determine how valuable one referrer is compared with another.
- Studying the keywords that users type into search engines to reach your site can help you tweak the content on your website. If you see a keyword that occasionally appears on the list, that could be a good indicator to start paying a bit more attention to that word.
- Use page views to determine which pages of your website are the most or least popular. Why are the least popular pages not visited often? Is it because they are hard to find or are they not relevant to your site?
- Track a few basic stats monthly such as visits, pageviews, and pageviews per visit for the entire website. This will give an indication how your site is performing overtime and may show seasonal trends which where unexpected.
These are just a few tips and there are many other things to look at with your web analytics software including geographic information, network information, and much more. However, sticking with the basics can help improve your site traffic with even the smallest of changes.
