Sometime recently (in the last couple of months I'm guessing, but I just noticed it) YouTube changed the way they display video statistics. You can now easily access trend data about the number of views, favourites and comments right under the video.
Most importantly, however, the new stats section includes information about the events that generate views. By events I mean referrals, embeds, favorites, shares, mobile views and things like that. YouTube now includes notes about all these to the view trend graph.
YouTube's statistics area showing how events (A,B,C,D, etc.) relate to viewing trends.
These events are the story behind the video--the how and why that led to its popularity. Without them, the graph has little meaning. This story is more important than ever since the social web not only drives significant traffic to a site, it provides context and scaffolding--external structure--around content. (I explain more about external structure at the end of this post.)
MeasureMap, the now-abandoned blog analytics tool developed by Adaptive Path and bought by Google, got this right years ago. Their dashboard included views, new posts and in-bound links. And their histogram component included annotations about new posts and comments--the events that typically drive traffic to blogs.
The MeasureMap dashboard combines traditional analytics (visitors) with events (posts, comments).
Somehow this simple innovation was lost when the Measure Map team rebuilt Google Analytics. As a regular Google Analytics user (and even occasional consultant) I've always felt that event tracking was a missed opportunity. Put another way, it felt like Measure Map really understood my blog. Google Analytics, powerful as it is, doesn't have that same understanding.
What kind of events would I like to track in Google Analytics? Let's see...
- New pages (or posts on a blog)
- Changes or revisions to content (especially on a corporate site)
- Proportion of content consumed (which MeasureMap did well)
- New comments (on a blog)
- New referrers
- Shares to social media sites
- New registrations (for a community site)
In January Google rolled out annotations for Google Analytics. Annotations seem like a powerful tool that could be used track events, but my quick dig into them tells me that they need to be customized to work properly. GA's Intelligence alerts and goal tracking can also provide some of this functionality, but again, it's not seamless. (Even though it's free, GA is starting to resemble an enterprise software product that requires developers and consultants to set-up and configure.)
I rely on Google Analytics regularly and I'm impressed by its capabilities, but it's starting to feel like a movie that's all special effects and no plot.
What YouTube is starting to do, and what MeasureMap did, is combine events and data to help you understand what's happening on your site (or with a video) quickly and easily. In other words, they tell a story.
Posted in Opinions on April 1, 2010
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