What we learned from our TubeSite

A few months ago, we posted about an amazing "website" that fully took advantage of the flexibility in design that video provides marketers. BooneOakley used YouTube features like annotations to build an interactive, video representation of a homepage for their business. Demian Brink, Strategic Director at BooneOakley, shared with us some of the lessons they learned from their website on YouTube.

It performs surprisingly well from an SEO perspective.

We were a bit worried that an all-video site was going to hurt our organic search results. To be fair, on search engines other than Google we’re underperforming. However, our organic search results on Google, which still holds a nearly 80% share of searches, are dramatically better than they used to be.

YouTube offers very good analytics tools.

From an analytics perspective, we basically threw caution into the wind in favor of a great creative idea. It wasn’t until after we launched the site that we discovered the fairly innocuous ‘Insight’ button listed under each video in the ‘My Videos’ section of our YouTube account.

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, Insight offers many of the same features such as number of views, traffic source and geographic location of views. However, it also offers some extras tailored to video/social media. These extras include things like Community Engagement – a measure based on viewer ratings and comments received – and Hot Spots, which is a second-by-second measure of audience attention for each video. Thanks to Hot Spots, we know that the vast majority of our three minute ‘home page’ video has an audience attention level that is well above average vs. other YouTube videos of similar length. We also know the most engaging part of our video by far comes at 1:29. Check it out and you’ll see why.

Great content + portability + measurability = success.

Our agency was founded on the idea of creative leverage – that great content inspires buzz and creates value far beyond the media and production price tag. Frankly, mainstream adoption of social media has made doing what we’ve always done a lot easier. People love a good story, and if it is good enough, they share it. We created an entertaining story that highlighted a few key points about our company and then put it somewhere it could be found and easily shared with others. From there, the viewers did the rest of the work for us.

Posted by Demian Brink, Strategic Director, BooneOakley