Who are your audience on YouTube and what turns them on or off?

For any serious video content creator, YouTube Analytics (YTA) is an essential tool. Using YTA regularly is the only way to assess the performance of your YouTube channel and to see any significant changes or patterns in your audiences’ behaviour. The insights that YTA provides are designed to highlight to creators what they need to do to make better videos. If you are approaching your video output strategically, YTA is your means to regularly assessing the performance of your videos and using those insights to constantly improve your content and audience strategies.

This is an introduction to the main features of YouTube Analytics. The guide is divided into two sections; firstly, using YTA to help you build your audience and secondly, using YTA to improve audience engagement.

SECTION A - Building an audience

1 Who are your viewers?

The Demographics feature in…

Our monthly roundup of the latest developments and advice in 5 key areas of digital marketing

1. Strategy and planning

#PlanToSucceed. In October we launched this new campaign offering free marketing planning tools. The idea behind the campaign is to encourage better planning in the countdown to 2014. We also created this new Slideshare to inspire improved marketing planning approaches.

Managing Digital Marketing in 2014? Last month I shared my ideas on 2014 marketing trends. We’re keen also to keen to develop understanding of how marketers will manage marketing in 2014, so we’re now following up with a joint survey with the Technology for Marketing and Advertising Conference (TFM&A 2014) - please take the survey to receive the free report advising on approaches to managing digital marketing in 2014.

Latest technology innovations?. Closely related, in…

Research examples of measuring email marketing effectiveness using attribution

Sometimes email is a victim of its own success. It works so well to drive revenue across all channels but this cross channel revenue is rarely calculated accurately and attributed to email. Why is this? Possible because email is the cheapest of the channels and it is shown to work without having to pull together all possible revenue. Basic stats prove email works.  However, every channel is competing for budget and has to be seen to improving over time so maybe it is time email got its fair share of the pie. An unpublished study by Alchemy Worx for one of their clients over a 10 month period to monitor revenue on days with and without sending any emails.

The charts shown in this article and all the data behind it is taken…

Overcome your 'oops' with agile content marketing

All was well in the best of possible worlds...

July 2011. We were all excited: we had just launched phase one of our first major online content marketing campaign. We released on time and everything was all well in the world. So we continued preparing the content for phase two, and we released it as per the tactical schedule. Still with beaming smiles on our faces. Two months after the launch of the campaign, we thought: 'I know this is a long-term campaign and we’ve got many more phases to come, but how is it performing so far?'

Oops!

We had everything in place: the content and the promotion, and the page views coming in. Except we’d forgotten to instrument some of the calls-to-action and hyperlinks on the landing pages to see how visitors were behaving on the site.

Oops!

We didn’t have all the data we needed to…

Using the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) to engage with different types of buyers when new products are launched

What is The Diffusion of Innovation?

This model helps a business to understand how a buyer adopts and engages with new products or technologies over time. Companies will use it when launching a new product or service, adapting it or introducing an existing product into a new market. It shows how the product can be adopted by five different categories/customer types and how to engage as a business with these types of people:   Of course, the emergence of new digital technologies and marketing techniques means that the diffusion of innovation model is particularly relevant to digital marketers. Analysts Gartner have a long standing report showing the stages of adoption of new technologies that is useful for digital strategists to follow. See our post on the Latest Gartner Digital Technology…

How brands can use Instagram to connect with customers

Following the news that Instagram is set to bring ads to the service, MyCustomer.com asked a number of experts how this will help brands connect with customers. When Instagram was bought by social media giant Facebook back in March, speculations quickly began about the likelihood that Instagram would follow Facebook’s lead and begin monetising the site. And it wasn’t long before this was confirmed. Last week, Instagram COO Emily White, who joined the company from Facebook, told the Wall Street Journal that the photo-sharing network would start rolling out advertising within the next year. 'We want to make money in the long term, but we don't have any short-term pressure,' she said, adding that the challenge for Instagram would be to integrate marketing without jeopardising the network’s ‘cool factor’. The details on…

7 examples of online merchandising

Online merchandising is an ever-changing task and the following examples highlight some current methods but are by no means exhaustive. Central to most of them is the idea of giving the customer the opportunity to choose the direction their visit will take; whether that might be choosing a trend, narrowing down the products they see or choosing their own add-on products. Or in other words: Personalisation. Using browsing history, trend data or customer data, these retailers are able to deliver a different experience for different user groups or indeed users. With so many different options available it would be easy to be overwhelmed; so here are 7 examples from great ecommerce websites of online merchandising execution.

1. Collection pages - example from Dunelm

A common problem faced by lots of retailers selling online is how to sell multiple products from the same range. This is especially true for …

A practical way to link different types of plan within a business

It’s often the blanket reactions to the word ‘planning’ that suggest somebody’s misunderstanding of what the word actually means. The classics are “I don’t have time to plan”? This is interesting since the same person has time to do the work again, or write off budget, for marketing that fails “I’m spending this week / month planning”. Wow - for what, the over keenness to get lost in planning can feel a bit too excitable sometimes! “I’m just getting on with it”. It’s common to see people deep dive into their work with lists, Gantt’s and schedules, and little context for the mass of action

So what’s the solution?

All planning is not the same, the purpose of planning is to enable enough forethought around the desired results vs costs from a set of actions. So it’s a ‘horses for courses’ thing and the…

A case study of boosting offline email signups 3.3x with SMS

Increasing the number of customer touch points used to ask for an email address is a good start to accelerating email list growth. However, the way in which the email address is requested makes a big difference to how fast your list grows. Its not just the copy and incentive, as are commonly considered, but the process too and for offline data collection the response channel. In this case providing customers the ability to subscribe by sending their email address using SMS delivered 3.3x more email addresses than simply advertising a web signup link. Remarkable given that the vast majority of brands simply give a URL in offline advertising, posters and other media. Zettasphere worked with Deal Monster to put to the test the signup method. Deal Monster are part of the Johnson press group, so it made sense for Deal Monster…

A step-by-step tutorial to managing Link detoxing

Link detoxing is extremely important for many reasons, including keeping your site active and penalty free. One bad link is a problem, but many bad links are a huge setback and should not be taken lightly. When you do a link detox you can either use a program or go through all of your links manually to check for any bad links. After finding bad links the next step is to get rid of them and delete them off of your profile. Questions that are often asked about this process include how do I spot bad links, should I use a program or do it manually, if I use a program which one, and how do you get penalties removed after the bad links are gone? You can find all of the answers to these questions and more below, as well as some basic information about…