Social Video Marketing Tool Gives “Insight” to YouTube Marketers

Last week, Google owned YouTube announced a new tool that allows people who upload videos on the service to track certain information about their video viewership.

Video uploaders can now track their videos’ popularity over time and by geographic area.

The tracking program is called YouTube Insight, and it’s free.  

Previously, YouTube reported the raw number of views captured by a video along with a list of its top traffic sources. The new program breaks down viewership by day and shows the states or countries where the most viewers are located.

This is just the first step in providing measurability for people uploading videos on YouTube. YouTube says that in the next few weeks it will release a “basic discovery” feature that will allow uploaders to find out how viewers find their videos.

Using this additional feature, people will be able to see how viewers found their videos - for example was it found via a YouTube search, through Google or more directly through an e-mail marketing campaign, or website link.

This is great news for marketers because it gives us a better indication of where people are located who are interested in our videos. Once YouTube adds the “source of traffic” functionality, we will finally start to be able to better track the effectiveness of referring sources.