YouTube Insight (Analytics) - Hot Spot function added
What is YouTube Hotspot?
At first, I thought YouTube team has invented something like this but for videos (HeatMaps):
At least the name of the feature gave me a similar hint.
It seems YouTube team has finally released an equivalent to Bounce Rate indicator (available in Google Analytics) but for videos:
I was puzzled by the graph and by the feature. The text at the top doesn’t bring much clarity:
The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. Above the average line, your video is hot: it’s retaining more viewers than average and they may be rewinding to watch that point again. Below the average line, your video’s gone cold: viewers are not rewinding or may be leaving the video faster than the average.
The easier way to understand this, is to understand the Bounce Rate first: it’s a way to measure the drop-out rate for any website. Bounce Rate of 75% means that 75% of people left the website after viewing the single first page on that website.
YouTube HotSpot graph shows the percentage of people that left the video at any given moment of time comparing to other videos (of similar length).
How does this help YouTube authors?
For the majority of the ones who post amateur cellphone “streetracing” videos it doesn’t mean anything.
Some of us who care about the effectiveness of what we do this is a great tool to analyse the user reaction on the video and correct any mistakes to make users watch our video until the end. Correcting mistakes is still very difficult because there is no way to replace the video. If you understand that your video needs to be improved to reduce the drop-out rate, you will have to delete the current video and upload a new version. This can be very negative:
- All references to your old version will be broken (e.g. you old video that is embedded at third-party websites will be broken)
- The old version (older than 2 months) was indexed. You will lose all your precious traffic for at least two months until your new version gets into the Google indexes properly
- Moreover, just like with everything else related to optimization, improving the video takes a lot of testing and means you’re likely to re-upload more than once
Wouldn’t it be great if YouTube had a function to replace the video file without losing the indexed page, the references and links?
By the way, the graph at the beginning of the post is real. What do you think it shows?
I interpret it this way: The video is effective and keeps users engaged until the end of the video. The “below average” chunk at the beginning shows that irrelevant viewers are filtered out right away (they understand this video is not interesting for them and leave).
I am sure there’s more to come on the YouTube Analytics front, so stay tuned!
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