Five Key Metrics To Look On Your Site

Digital has always been perceived as the most measurable media. But most measurements are restricted to clicks and impressions--maybe a deeper insights could also throw some important take-away for marketers.

Overall Site Traffic Trends
Most of them do not pay attention to this simple metric....very simple one...its there on your analytic page. Walk ins are counted very effectively, but any visit through website hardly paid attention to. 

Site visit details could give you simple insights as to what was the percentage increase when there was a TV campaign or for that matter a print ad mentioning the URL of the clients website. Probing a bit more can also give us insights if any increase happened on the web "contact us" pages and if the phone rang a bit more.
The varied sources of visits can also be mapped and correlated. Digital marketers often tend to down play the role of  traditional media because there's no defined click path, but actually, there is no click path either for banner campaign. The intent is the same to drive awareness and purchase intent. The available data needs to be just looked at.
 

Search Volume through branded keywords
Search can provide a good insight into a marketing campaign. It gets even more insightful when we start looking into branded and non branded search. The branded search traffic is always something which most of them ignore with an assumption that "people are aware of the brand".
How people become aware of the brand is a very important as the traffic generated through branded search can also throw some insights into how successful your offline campaign was.

Conversions
Conversions don't need to be typically attached to a monetary value, but it could also be a "contact us" form submission or even a weekly newsletter signups/registrations. But, apart from these standard definition of conversions, even if you could track down visitors who moved and search for "getting direction" to your store could also be a good indicator.
The same logic of defining "hot lead" v/s "cold lead" can also be applied to these scenarios.

Traffic of Conversions
With conversions in place, it is also important to understand the audience who came through...a simple search to keyword phrases of all visitors could throw insights on what were the phrases used to reach different pages within your site.
This could also help you analyze if you need a change in keywords and pay attention to certain keywords you are not focusing on.

Referrer Sites Data
Search and regular advertising need not be the only route to reach your site. People could also come in through referrer sites.
Researching this could also give some key insights on who these audiences are by mapping the sites they came through from. Maybe a different set of audience whom you may not be reaching would have shown interest also.

Clicks may not always be the right metric for measuring the effectiveness. The right data need to be looked at much harder.

Again, these may just be the basic ones to look out for...at least for a start.

More In-Depth Analytics on YouTube videos--Time Watched Metrics

YouTube reworks its video measurement metrics on basis of engagements, moving away from its measurements basis view time.

The latest changes comes in line with the earlier changes YouTube been implementing, starting with the Suggested video changes implemented in March.

Why This ?

YouTube’s video features were previously designed to drive views. This so called strategy attracted clicks to videos, but essentially videos that keep users engaged reduced.( some marketers referred this as “cleavage thumbnails” strategy to attract clicks).

The experimental results of these earlier changes were positive as per YouTube experiment – less clicking, more watching. 

So, YouTube expects the amount of time viewers spend watching videos from search and across the site to increase.

What does this mean?

So the benefiters from this would be the marketers with dedicated YouTube channel, with the channel benefiting if your videos drive more engaging time ranking higher than videos that just drive clicks, where you would see drop in rankings

So the best things that a marketer can benefit would be to generate videos that would make people watch. Some of the old techniques like using shorter video format to get higher retention rate would also backfire. While high retention on your videos could mean higher indication of engagement, this doesn't translate into a longer viewing session on YouTube. So, your video isn’t more likely to be seen just because it’s shorter.

However the flip side with marketers intentionally making their videos longer, assuming longer videos would lead to more watch time, would also not benefit, since this again may not translate into engagement through long videos.

So the key take away from this is--YouTube recommends to make greater videos that your audience would watch, love and share. As a result, YouTube’s primary recommendation is to make great videos that your audience will love and share, and stay away from questionable optimization strategies.

What to watch?

The day before it announced its algorithm change, YouTube added the new time watched reporting to its YouTube Analytics, providing video marketers with more tools to evaluate the performance of their videos and channel.

If video marketers could watch the Analytics carefully, they could use them to better understand what the audience wants to watch. So essentially more time watching content means a more engaged audience and more ad revenue for YouTube :)....and that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes.