Yesterday YouTube announced the launch of Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. Currently Insight offers a few key metrics, including a breakdown of video views by geographic location, a video’s popularity in a market relative to other YouTube videos, and video popularity growth rates over a given period of time. The YouTube blog post also mentions that they will be releasing more features in the near future.
I think Insight can deliver significant value to small businesses and franchise companies that make use of YouTube videos to drive traffic to their site or locations. Even the Google Analytics Team is pumped up about it. As YouTube adds more features and metrics, businesses will be better able to gauge the ROI of online video production. One metric that the YouTube blog post mentions that should be rolled out “fairly quickly” is “a specific breakdown of how viewers discovered the video.” This metric alone will offer businesses and franchises great “insight” into how to title and describe future videos, as well as, what the subject matter should be. One specific case is the use of YouTube videos in Google Local business listings. Franchise companies with numerous locations that make use of business listing videos will be able to see which listings get the most video views. Perhaps people searching for their business in California watch the videos a lot more than people searching in Florida.
Let us know what you think of Insight.