YouTube just launched a new addition to their Insight metrics package called “Hot Spots”
Hot Spots lets you drill down into your video’s timeline, giving you an unprecedented look at how audiences feel about each moment of your content.
The data is based on:
- Users abandoning a video before it’s finished playing
- Users fastforwarding past a section
- Users rewinding to re-watch a section
But the nice thing about the graph is that it isn’t just a display of viewers over time. Instead, the graph is based on an average for videos around the same length as yours. This makes things a little more relevant because without it, everyone’s graphs would have some kind of general downslope (no video is watched all the way through all the time). With an average-adjusted graph, you can see whether your dropoff rate is the best you could hope for or if it’s worse than normal.
What would be really cool though is if the Hot Spots data for a video was publicly available (right now, you can only see data on your own videos). It could provide an incredibly valuable pool of research data not just for advertisers, but for anyone involved in visual communication. It’s like a 20-million-person focus group.
Google is going to take over the world.
-Nick
Does anyone know why it works for some videos but not others? This tool is really useful but won’t show the Hot Spots tab for random videos.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is it completly random or is there a reason the Hot Spots tab doesn’t show?
Any advice?
I think the feature is still being rolled out – a lot of our videos are missing the tab as well, and some commenters on the official YouTube blog aren’t seeing it either.
I expect this will be sorted out in the next couple of days.