YouTube has been the revolution in the Internet for sharing videos covering different topics. There are 24 hours worth of video uploaded every minute on YouTube making it the second largest search engine in the World. It has become vital for business to gain market value over the Internet and YouTube has the right mix with its varied topics.

YouTube has a reputation of being the place to look for funny videos. It is the second place to go after probably ‘Googling’ it. Most videos generate a one-time audience response, as very few people look for the same video again. Since YouTube plays such an important in search results and ranking, it cannot be overlooked. To reach out to your audience and to keep them coming back to view the videos again, here are some rules to be followed :

1. Creation of a channel specific to the videos
2. The video has to be optimized with the desired keywords and involving in the community discussions is vital
3. It is also essential to upload new videos frequently
4. It important to keep in mind while creating the videos that viewer would come back to view the videos only if the videos are informative, original and interesting
5. Share the video across the social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter using the sharing options provided by YouTube using the share option provided. This helps increase visibility and better search engine optimization
6. Embed the videos in the blog. This generates higher views for the blog as well as reaching out to the desired target audience

YouTube has become feature rich with its recent launch of trending topics, to provide more real time value and ease of use for the user in finding information on trending topics. This new addition has made YouTube all the more attractive making it vital for business to get a share of voice in the online market as the volume of search in YouTube is growing at an increasing pace.

Contributed by Vishnuram Muthukumarasamy

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

The reason why Google Analytics (GA) is sought after is that you can track website traffic for a complete process defined in an online business model. One can set the ultimate target as the goal for GA tracking and GA will track every step of the process until the defined goal.

However, the problem is that GA does not reprocess historical data.  GA will only start to track goal conversion data from the day you set the goal in GA. Nevertheless, here is a simple way to track goal conversions without setting goals in GA for historical data as well. To do this, here are some conditions:

1) You should tag your entire website by the proper Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). At any rate, pages from the landing page to the goal conversion page must have the proper GATC.

2) Here are two examples:

Case I:

The URL of the goal conversion page should be different from the other pages.

Example of unique URLs are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

Here the URL from the Sign up Form to the Final Goal Page has unique URLs: ‘www.mysite.com/sign_up.html’

The ideal path should be as follows:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/thanksone.html

Case II:

The page title should be different for each step despite the unique URLs.

The page name is mentioned between title tags of the page e.g. <title> Page Name </title>. For example, you can check the website www.position2.com where the home page is titled:

<title> Social Media Marketing & Search Engine Marketing Company – Position2 </title>

Therefore, the steps to take for different page names are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – Your Air Ticket

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – Registration Form

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – Thanks for signing up!

Here is how you can get goal conversion values in GA:

1) Go for Advanced Segments

2) Create new segment ‘Goal Conversion’ for Case I above. Use the thank you page request URI ‘/thanksone.html’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

For Case II, use the page title of the thank you page ‘Thanks for signing up!’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

3) Choose two segments such as the one from Default Segment and another from Goal Conversion. Apply it to the report.

4) You will see the output as:

Here you can clearly see that out of 1,123 visits, 67 visits were converted. We found 98% accuracy of achieving goal conversion numbers through the Advanced Segments approach. You can apply this segmentation to all reports excluding goal-reporting suit.

Contributed by Bhagawat Jadhav

Thursday, August 13th, 2009