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218 Part IV Promotion and Monetization

Tracking Effectiveness

The number of views a video obtains isn’t necessarily indicative of how effective it
is. A video might gain a huge viewership but result in few sales or little brand
awareness; conversely, a video with a small number of viewers might result in much
higher sales or brand awareness.

Tracking the effectiveness of a video is more difficult than tracking simple viewer-
ship. No analytical tools measure this metric; in fact, it’s more of a black art than it
is a science. With that caveat, there are ways to get a general handle on how effec-
tive a video is.

Tracking Interactivity

One measure of effectiveness is how well the video involves the viewers—that is,
how viewers interact with the video. You can deduce the level of interaction from
the number of comments and video responses left by viewers. The more that the
video draws in viewers, the more viewers leave personal comments and responses.

Think of it this way. If your video is just a light entertainment, viewers will likely
not be inspired to leave comments. If, on the other hand, your video proves particu-
larly useful or educational, viewers are more likely to leave comments to that effect.
The more comments you get, the better the video is at involving the viewer.

On a meta level, you can track the effectiveness of all your videos in total by noting
the number of subscribers you get to your YouTube channel. If your videos connect
with viewers, they’re more likely to subscribe to your channel to get notice of future
videos. If your videos are less effective, viewers are less likely to subscribe.

Tracking Traffic

If you’re using your YouTube videos to sell products or services directly from your
website, the best way to measure the effectiveness of each video is simply to track
traffic from each YouTube video back to your site. There are a number of ways to
do this.

Note

Most website-hosting services provide their own traffic analysis tools. You
can also use a third-party tool, such as Google Analytics or Webmetrics, to
do the tracking.

Just about any website analysis tool will show where your site traffic comes from—
that is, the previous sites viewed by your site’s visitors. By using this type of tool, it’s