- Discovery over time
- Views from mobile devices
- Views from subscribers

The Discovery Over Time feature is really a combination of two existing features – the ability to track a video’s view count/popularity over time, and the Discovery section that shows how viewers found a video. The Discovery Over Time feature provides a graph that shows how people have discovered your video over time.

YouTube has added the Mobile Views feature because of the huge increase in mobile video watching. "As more and more people use smart phones, the number of views and uploads we get from mobile devices has exploded: we get tens of millions of views every day from mobile phones, and since the beginning of the year YouTube uploads from phones have jumped 1700%," says YouTube.

The Views From Subscribers feature lets users track views from different subscription modules, like homepage subscriptions, the subscriptions page, and subscription email. Note that the feature won’t work for views from before September, because YouTube has only had it turned on for a week.

YouTube says that they will be releasing more features for YouTube Insight soon. They give no clues as to what these features will be, however.

The White House references an article from Micah L. Sifry at techPresident, who looks at YouTube Insight data to see what regions some of the President’s speeches were most popular in.

I would imagine that if you run through all of the White House videos, more of them will have the strongest popularity in the United States, but of the ones the White House picks out specifically, only one of them had the US as the location where it was most popular, and that was Obama’s speech to the Muslim World in Cairo.

Here is a look at a couple more:

The President’s Video Message to the Iranian People on the Nowruz Holiday

The President’s Speech in Ghana

This information is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it illustrates how YouTube users (including businesses) can look at data that YouTube freely provides, and there is plenty more of that if you use the YouTube Insight tool. Secondly, I find it interesting that the government’s use of YouTube is clearly doing wonders for getting content viewed by the online population in appropriate parts of the world. It’s not that the information is unexpected, but it highlights the role online video, social media, and YouTube specifically are playing in current events.

On a semi-related note, Nielsen is reporting that 24.7 million people watched Obama’s prime time health care press conference. Thanks to online video and YouTube (not to mention DVR), there will likely be many more viewings still to come as well.

On another related note, YouTube is now encouaging video uploaders to share their stats from YouTube Insight on their video pages. The company recently discussed benefits to advertisers and partners.

"Whether you want to know how old your audience is, how many times your most-viewed video was rated last week, or which minute of your clip is most engaging, YouTube Insight can give you the answer. As we add functionality, we’re careful to preserve YouTube Insight’s clean and easy-to-use look and feel," says YouTube.

Last month, YouTube Insight got more focused on how viewers interact with videos. They added a community tab, which lets you view numbers related to ratings, comments, favorites, or all three.

Now you can take any information obtained through YouTube Insight a step further. A YouTube spokesperson tells WebProNews that they have added a feature that lets you export information as a CSV file, which means you can open it up in Google Docs, Microsoft Excel, or other spreadsheet programs.

"It basically means that from now on there is no limit to what users can do with their data!" the spokesperson says.

Examples YouTube gives of ways that this new feature might be useful include comparing view counts for different videos side by side, mapping out where viewers are coming from over time, or comparing discovery sources by country. Some others the spokesperson shared include:

- Combine data from all your Channels: That way, you can see how your content as a whole is doing on YouTube. This is especially useful for big partners with thousands of Channels.

- Discovery: Before, you could see whether YouTube Search or embedding drives most traffic. But what if you want to see whether the #2 search term drives more traffic than the top embed? Exporting your data allows you to do that.

As online video popularity continues to grow both in terms of content and advertising, video analytics are going to become increasingly important for getting the most out of your videos. The more freedom you have to analyze your data, the better chance you’re going to have of improving performance.

Web Analytics and SEO

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz lists web analytics as one of the top seven reasons that companies are investing in SEO during the economic downturn. "It’s sad, but true," he says. "When a downturn arrives or panic sets in, someone, maybe the first someone in a long time, checks the web analytics to see where revenue is still coming in. Not surprisingly, search engine referrals with their exceptional targeting and intent-matching are ranking high on the list."

Word on the street is that web analytics are going to be playing an even more crucial part than ever in traffic heading into the new year. As both Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts talk about in their respective interviews with WebProNews, Google is going to be getting more personalized with search results, and this is going to make traditional SEO strategies more difficult, and perhaps some even obsolete.

We discussed recently how your site’s bounce rate might already play a role in your search engine rankings. SEO Black Hat shared some interesting findings and Google Analytics data regarding this:

Overall Traffic

Google Traffic

Bounce Rates

Obviously it’s going to take some analysis to improve your bounce rate. Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, and Google Analytics group manager Brett Crosby discussed this with Mike McDonald at SES a while back:

Blog Analytics

Blogs have become a big part of business for many companies, and site-owners. Blogs shouldn’t necessarily be treated like other sites when it comes to analytics however. "There are more companies blogging now than ever," says Lee Odden at Online Marketing Blog. "How do you measure results? Measuring the social web is a different thing than what most web analytics packages offer. It can be easy to start a blog, but making it successful requires an excellent feedback mechanism. Blog analytics is one of those sources of feedback to know what’s working and what’s not."

Odden is conducting a poll on preferred blog analytics tools, and so far Google Analytics is ahead by a long shot.

 Kaushik discusses in-depth, six metrics that should be used to measure the success of a blog (as illustrated in his chart below) in a detailed blog post.

Video Analytics

As online video usage continues to trend upward and video search is improved upon, video analytics are going to carry increasing significance as well. It’s going to be interesting to see the strides made in this department over the coming year.

YouTube has already begun offering a tool – YouTube Insight, which is an analytics program for videos that lets users get a look into where and by whom videos were posted. A couple months ago they released a feature for it that allows you to actually pinpoint the specific parts of videos that get viewed the most. This will be a huge metric, particularly when it comes to advertising. "If you give users the tools to attract larger audiences, they’ll create more ad inventory," as Advertising Age noted.

I’m sure there are a number of other video analytics tools out there, and it will be interesting to see what other tools (and metrics for that matter) become relevant.

Analytics Mistakes

Bryan Eisenberg at the Microsoft AdCenter Blog talks a good deal about the seven biggest mistakes of web analytics, which according to him are as follows:

1. Improper Implementation
2. No Goals Setup
3. No Segmentation
4. Paying Too Much Attention to Irrelevant Data
5. Not Setting up Milestone Events Documentation
6. Not Combining Quantitative Data with Qualitative Data
7.  Not Taking Action On the Data

That last one is the one that should really be weighing on your business-minded conscience, and what is likely going to hurt you more than ever in the future. Although the first one will get you on the wrong track right from the start, so taking care of that should be a top priority.

Let me be blunt. Quit screwing around and start taking your analytical data seriously. It just might be the key to your business’s survival as we face not only economic downturn, but a new world of Internet marketing waiting ahead for us. Thoughts?