The Saiko

You know YouTube to be the place where you indulge yourself by watching pointless and pirated videos.  But after today, you’ll know YouTube as the video site outfitted with Google Analytics for brand channels.  For those of you that are not techie super dorks like The Saiko, analytics are a major leap forward for YouTube because they provide data on how people are interacting with the videos.  That information is worth its weight in gold for advertisers.

Up until now, the only data brands and users could scrape from their videos were to use YouTube Insight.  Insight was able to provide basic data like:

• basic demographic data
• track the video’s global popularity
• how it’s been rated by others

Don’t get us wrong.  That is better than nothing, but Google Analytics is going to supercharge the video experience for people that post.  Here’s the catch, however:  What in the hell are you going to do with the data once you get it?  This is where most organizations/advertisers drop the ball.  But before you beat yourself up for your lack of skills with data, let’s take a look at what Google Analytics is going to bring to the table:

• track how long visitors stay
• repeat visits
• page views
• bounce rate
• geo-locating viewers
• identify the language the viewer speaks

Sure this sounds like a great feature for advertisers, but is it relevant for people that just post videos because they want to share their stupid pet tricks with the world?  Yes, if that person has interest in monetizing the 1.4 million views they got for their “watch my goldfish play poker” video.  We’re going to wait and see if this is something that picks up with the average viewer.  We hope so.