Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Watching Video Metrics

You’ve heard it from at least one client (if you’re an agency) or perhaps from your boss, if you are a company just getting into social: “We need a viral video!” You’ve all had to break the sad news that you can’t force a video to go viral, and that it has to hit that elusive sweet spot that compels viewers to share it. It has to become a meme (a piece of content online or a content theme that gets shared, reshared, added to, remixed and shared again by people online, such as lolcats).

You’ve probably then shared the good news that even nonviral videos that get good page views have direct, measureable benefits for marketing and brand education and outreach. Then comes the tough question: How do you measure video to make sure that you’re optimizing the videos you create?

Looking at the Video ID Code

The first component to tracking a YouTube video is the Video ID Code. That’s the row of mish-mashed letters, numbers, and symbols in the video URL. It comes right after /watch?v= and ends before the &feature in the longer URLs, as in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&feature=youtu.be

The bold part of the preceding URL is the Video ID Code.

Now you have to put the code on your page or in a blog post in such a way that it gets tracked by Google Analytics. You do this by adding states, like this:

Var STATE_UNSTARTED = ‘-1’;

Var STATE_PLAYING = ‘1’;

Var STATE_PAUSED = ‘2’;

Var STATE_BUFFERING = ‘3’;

Var STATE_VIDEOCUED = ‘5’;

Var STATES = {

‘-1’ : ‘unstarted’, ...