So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on the YouTube Algorithm. We walk through what gets your videos seen, using YouTube as part of your content plan, and using the analytics to your advantage. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- What we do and don’t know about how the YouTube algorithm works
- The basics for each video you post
- The one thing 90% of videos fail to do that impacts your video reach
Upcoming Episodes:
- How do you benchmark a website’s performance? – 5/20/2021
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:22
Happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show from Trust Insights, I’m joined by Chris. Last week, you had just John and Chris, and this week you have just myself and Chris. And sometimes it’s just you and John. So you know, we’re just kind of mixing it up a little bit. This week, we are talking about YouTube and video algorithms and Video SEO. And so one of the things that we get asked a lot is around YouTube, and what are some of the best practices. And what always kind of comes as a surprise to people is that YouTube should be treated like a search engine, because that’s what it is. It’s just videos instead of text and articles. And it is part of the Google Marketing Platform. And so it uses a lot of the same technology. But Chris, we’re gonna dive into all of that. So, you know, where do we start with understanding YouTube’s video algorithm? What do we need to know about it?
Christopher Penn 1:26
Well, that depends on how much you like reading academic papers. The core of what makes you look so strong. The core of all of what makes YouTube special, really is the 2016 paper that Google published on the topic that is called adipose tissue deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations. Now, this paper goes on at length for the technology that underpins YouTube and how it makes recommendations how it It identifies videos, that should be suggested to users in a way that makes the user happy fulfills user 10 guesses reasonably well, what the next things that users would like to see. And we don’t need to and we won’t dig into the neural network behind all this, we’re just going to talk about a few of the cogent features that the algorithm takes the model takes into account. And then we reverse engineer that to understand what our YouTube strategy could be. So a few things here. First, you have some of these different vectors, these vectors are nothing more than variables, data points have things like what the user has watched, right? So your watch history takes is part of what you get recommended. Which means that and we’ll talk about this in strategy. If you want somebody to see your videos, it’s kind of a catch 22 they have to have seen your videos, just kind of a an awkward thing. But it basically means that YouTube is going to prefer things you’ve already seen, because it assumes that he liked that channel, you know, you’re watching Lindsey Stirling, or you’re watching first 211 or whoever on YouTube, you’re probably gonna watch this stuff like that. And it’s going to take into account other similar things. So if you like first 211, you probably like Halo seen if you’re like Halo CD, probably like cold wallets, and so on and so forth. That’s one part of this vector. The second part of the vector is called embedded search tokens. And this is words, this is where the title, the description of what you searched for, as a user, YouTube uses its machine learning to try and find videos that have semantic matches to those terms. So if I type in data analytics, it’s going to find me videos that are about that, but not just the title of the description, it’s going to be your past search history to try and find related terms, it’s going to use its own natural language library. And it’s going to use its closed captions. One thing you may have noticed on YouTube, is, if you don’t upload closed captions, a good chunk of the time, as long as assuming you’re not posting music video, it will pry them for you. And they can be not too accurate. But it does attempt to do that. So that’s part two. And then the part three and four here are other things like where are you in the world, because obviously, there’s some content on YouTube that you can’t watch if you’re not in that region that’s encoded for and then other user variables. So a lot of those things that the algorithm is looking for are things that we can reverse engineer to say, Okay, how does this inform our YouTube strategy? Hey, John.
John Wall 4:41
Hello, I see I came in on the easy stuff. I just had my second shot with Dr. Fauci over at the clinic. So I was like doing a Ferris Bueller like running through backyards to get here and dive into my chair at the last minute.
Christopher Penn 4:58
Excellent. We can See, hear that in terms of categorical features, there’s other things take into account to user language, the video language obviously important, right? You’re probably not going to enjoy as much videos that you can understand. Unless you’re weird like me like watching the voice, you know shows that the voice from like other countries, how long you’ve watched similar types of videos, types of, you know, previous impressions of videos, which how fast you scrolled past things, and YouTube. So again, that’s one of those things where that thumbnail that video, it’s got to be a thumb stopper. Right, it’s got to keep you from scrolling on. So there’s a lot of things in this paper that are worth deconstructing. So now, here’s the fun part, which is, how do we, so what, right, we’ve got this great paper, but what do we do with it? The first thing we need to do is figure out what are we already doing what have we already got. So I’m going to go ahead and pop on over to the Trust Insights YouTube studio page. Anyone who’s in YouTube should be intimately familiar with either the desktop version of this, or the mobile version, they’re both very good. And the first place we want to go, unsurprisingly, is on the left hand side analytics. Inside here, we’re going to go into reach. And inside, we’re going to scroll down. And this is where you start to get the interesting stuff like here’s your traffic source types, unknown, external from YouTube, YouTube search, from suggested videos, from Channel pages, and others. And then it tells you when your Sources External, where external visitor come from. So in this case, Google search, right, so the 28 24% of my 28% is from Google from us, yay, go us. Other parts of YouTube, Twitter, and the Chrome app, and then on YouTube itself, YouTube, 19% of our videos, get their views from YouTube search itself. Google Analytics are number one term advertising, Google ads, Google Data Studio, and so on and so forth. It’s recommended, you know, other suggested videos. So the first thing you want to do is baseline, look at this and go, how are we doing? Right? If 0% of your video views come from YouTube search, it probably means things aren’t great, right? Yeah. 100% comes from it. That means you’re not doing enough marketing of your videos elsewhere. Besides YouTube.
Katie Robbert 7:16
It’s interesting, because you’re walking through it as if it’s supposed to be another part of your content strategy, because it has a lot of the same elements that a blog post has, or other content on your website. And I think that, that, rather than having a separate YouTube strategy, YouTube should be a part of your overall content strategy, you know, because you’re mentioning things like titles and keywords, and, you know, the closed captioning and the transcription. And that’s all just, you know, the narrative content that goes along with it. And then where are people coming from to get to your YouTube site? And what keywords and you know, and so I think that that is a missed opportunity for some businesses who aren’t utilizing YouTube at all, or if they’re just once in a while posting a video to their channel and hoping for the best.
Christopher Penn 8:09
Exactly right. It is part of a nutritious content strategy. I was actually reading the other day, I’m the origin part of a nutritious breakfast and some terrifying stuff. We’ll talk about that in another show. So, again, one of the things that we always talk about with attribution analysis is to make sure you’re not over indexed on one particular thing, right? A lot of these channel names are very similar should look very similar, right? where Google has no idea where this came from. So it’s going to sound that you direct, external traffic from websites and apps that embed your videos, right? So if I put a YouTube video on Trust, insights.ai, you watch it there, instead of on YouTube, it shows up an external YouTube search suggested videos, channel pages, and so forth. You do want to have that nice mix, you don’t want to be overly reliant on any one thing. So make sure you go through baseline this get a sense for this and maybe even if you’re if you’re have been doing this a little while, expand that timeframe, maybe go out like 90 days or 365 days to see what’s been happening. See if you can notice any changes. So that’s step one. Know where you are.
Katie Robbert 9:16
before you move on from that, Chris, I have a question. So I know we do this in our newsletter email and I know that our friend Gini Dietrich does this every Friday with her asked me anything YouTube videos, and so you embed the video in the email newsletter for people to watch their but then they can also go to your YouTube channel from that by clicking on the video. How does that show up in your data here? What would that look like?
Christopher Penn 9:43
That will that was coming in traffic sources from external you can’t actually put a video in an email there’s email does not support video players itself. You can put a thumbnail in which what that typically depends on where you link it to. So if you link it to your website, they’ll show up as external. If you link it directly to YouTube, it’s going to come in as director unknown, because,
Unknown Speaker 10:02
okay, no.
Christopher Penn 10:06
Yes. It’s funny. You used to be able to tie your YouTube channel into your Google Analytics account to get some more data that way, Google turn that off last year.
John Wall 10:15
So is that available in 360? Is there any way still to do that? Or you just pretty much you just what you do? You’re just not doing it anymore? Exactly. Google said,
Christopher Penn 10:25
Nope, not doing anymore. So we’ve got our baseline, we have a general idea of what we’re doing okay. For right, you know, here’s, you know, some of the search terms, you can go in and see the search terms. So far, so good. But this is not super high volume, right? We’re not going to win any awards by getting two views on the term Google Analytics. So we need to go out and figure out what else should we be be trying to found before? Wow, that was mango trying to be found for? There’s a couple of different places you can do this. One of the places that’s easy, free and relatively straightforward is of course, Google Trends. You go to trends google.com, put in data science, putting Google Analytics here. Let’s put in what are the terms Google ads? And instead of everything I’m going to put in just YouTube search, right? So there’s all these different options. And this gives me a sense of Okay, well, what are the more popular terms, Google ads and and Google Analytics definitely in there, nothing really like blowing things up. You can see some of the regional stuff. And then if I switch this to top queries, you can get a sense of what are some of the related terms here, this is good. But it’s a lot of manual work, and a lot of guesswork better is to use any one of the major SEO tools, they all have the ability to look at YouTube. So I’m going to go here to h refs. But again, this works in SEM rush, this works in Moz, you name it, you’ll notice YouTube is one of the selectors here, I can choose YouTube. So I’m gonna go ahead and put in Google Analytics, analytics, data, data science, ads, Google ads, and so on and so forth. And we’re gonna switch over here to having same terms, so we can get a sense of, you know, some of the bigger volume phrases, hey, look, Facebook ads, right is the largest volume search on YouTube. Globally, then data science and big data. We don’t really care about free with ads, movies and stuff like that. data structures and algorithms. Data is beautiful, which is a fantastic channel. YouTube ads. So we’ve got some got some starting points here for additional topics, right? We should probably do a show on Facebook ads, right? It’s it does very well, it’s a lot of volume goes and it gets a lot of clicks. If you look at the volume versus the clicks, you know, that’s that’s more than half. And the return rate, which is this column here is very high return rate basically means how often does that person come back to that search term is above one is good.
Katie Robbert 13:10
So what strikes me is that a couple of weeks ago, we did record a podcast, talking about, you know, the changes with iOS 14, and Facebook business manager and advertising. So would it make sense for us to go back because we record our podcast using video, post it to YouTube, in addition to our just our audio streaming services? Should we go back and see how we can add Facebook ads to that? Would that make sense? Like, can you can you re optimize video content the same way you can like blog content or web page content?
Christopher Penn 13:49
Not really, you can, you can add in stuff into the title, the description and the tags, the video, but the actual video content itself would be a little more tricky for that. So it’d be a little bit tougher. What I would suggest we do and is and this is a more advanced technique, there really is no way you can see here, there’s no search rankings, you know, showing up here, right? It’s not like irregulars, we can see the top ranking pages. So you have to go into YouTube for a given term. And essentially say okay, I want to know, let’s look at the analytics here. And so one of the top videos that rank for that, you know, here are a bunch of these videos, what I like to do, because I’m weird, is take these videos, download the audio from them, and then feed that to a transcription service and then run that through some machine learning software to say Okay, tell me what the words are in the that are in common in these top five videos, because that again can help me expand my knowledge of what should we be talking about? So we see Facebook ads should take a look. Let’s go. In fact, let’s go do that Facebook ads, skip past the actual advertising. And then we’ll pull these top five ads, and a ton of videos and look at the language that they’re using. So I did this for both Google Analytics and management consulting a little bit earlier. And, you know, Google Analytics logically, number one term, bounce rate, data analytics, predictive analytics, management consulting. So as if we were going to start doing shows around, you know, trying to aim for Google Analytics, we’d want to talk about the bounce rate of pages and stuff, we want to talk about predictive analytics. We’re talking about management, consulting, you know, what is management consulting, things like that? What does it you know, how does consulting firm work? How do you integrate with private equity? cocktail hours? figures?
Katie Robbert 15:53
I have a question, though. Going back to where we started with that academic paper. If I put in the term Facebook ads, what I get the exact same search results is you because one of the things that you were talking about was, in order for people to see your video, they need to have seen one of your other videos? So how does that? How does that work? In terms of what YouTube is searching? is serving up as search results? Would we get the same set of results?
Christopher Penn 16:21
If we were logged in? We would not? If we were logged out? We should get similar ish results. So I forgot to say log yourself out of Google first?
Katie Robbert 16:29
Or can it work in incognito mode? Or is it just truly the login?
Unknown Speaker 16:34
Let’s find out?
Katie Robbert 16:36
Because I think that that’s one of the things that that’s interesting, too, is no two sets of search results are probably going to be identical based on what we’re learning about how the algorithm is recommending videos
Christopher Penn 16:52
on Facebook ads. So even though I’m not signed in, Google still knows my location, because it knows the IP address you’re paying for. But yeah, you can see there are somewhat different videos is this, this strange looking person is in fewer of the top five results for that term. So you’re right, you actually make sure make sure that you are logged out so that you’re getting it but you raise a good point. This is a point about SEO in general, the idea of a top ranking term is hard to come by these days, because so many people are getting such personalized results. That Yeah, if two people are logged in, they’re gonna see very different search results based on their past history, because that’s part of part of the way these deep learning algorithms work. Today, oh, Brian had a question here. For just shoot tools that show what terms your videos are ranking for? I don’t know. I don’t know of any. I know there’s a bunch of companies out there like to buddy and a few others. I don’t know if they can actually do that. That would be a, I guess, go check with the vendor. Okay, so you’ve gone through, you’ve got an idea of what your keywords and key phrases are. Now you got to go and make the content for YouTube, right, which is, hopefully we’re not going to cover making YouTube videos today. But it’s it is pretty straightforward. Some important things to keep in mind one you should have a content calendar, right? So if you have the ability to do so, generated a content calendar, write a predictive one ideally so you can see when terms is going to rise and fall by audience interest in try to time not only the videos creation, but then the publication those videos, those things, one of the things you can do on YouTube. Let’s go and go back there. I think I’m logged out is as you publish a video through YouTube upload video. Let’s see. I need a scrap video to toss in here just to uh let’s use my end card video.
Well, that’s not working.
John Wall 19:14
say that’s the something has gone horribly wrong face.
Katie Robbert 19:19
Well, so I’ll do a little plug. So Chris, while you’re doing that you had mentioned that it would be helpful if someone has a content calendar. More specifically predictive content calendar. That is something that we at Trust Insights can certainly do we can certainly help you with hit up our boy John Wall if you want to learn more about it. I’m pointing down because he’s two blocks down for me like The Brady Bunch.
Christopher Penn 19:47
Okay.
Katie Robbert 19:49
But a content calendar doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it should definitely include some keyword research and some forward thinking in terms of planning of making sure you are getting a good balance of terms that you’re not just always going after the same term, week after week after week.
Christopher Penn 20:07
Exactly. So one of the things you would do, and that was not made for kids, I never make anything for kids, is you can set a video as a premiere, you can schedule it, and you can probably set a premiere date. Well guess what, when should the premiere be when that term peaks in your content calendar and predict the content calendar, right? So it makes logical sense to, to use the YouTube features that are there to make sure that you’re being seen. So that’s one of the big things that again, a lot of folks don’t do that they really should do. Second thing, subtitles. So we’ve been talking, obviously, for a while now about the importance of text. Google will attempt to do transcription on its own. Google will not do such a hot job. In fact, there are entire videos on YouTube, popular musicians who make song covers of bad YouTube transcriptions of their songs, right. So the lyrics, you know, mangled? And it is quite funny. There’s that there’s somewhat of a Melinda does Google Translate songs like watching us on Google Translate twice to attempt to try and get the lyrics, it’s hilarious comedy. You want to make sure that the the transcripts, the subtitles you provide to YouTube are as good as can be. So use whatever service you want, we use otter, but there’s Rev. There’s all these different services out there, there’s, you can just hire somebody to do the transcripts manually. But you want that text loaded in here, and you want it with your keywords. So part of the making content part is have that keyword list handy and know what you’re going to talk about in that show so that you can say, Yep, we’re doing YouTube, SEO, or were you doing video SEO or doing video optimization or video search, I’ve got to go through my list to make sure I’ve said all that’s what goes in the transcript. And you all you load that into the subtitle. So it’s a really important part of making these videos knowing what you’re gonna say. And then making sure it’s in the subtitles because Google processes those. The third thing is having an end screen of some kind. This is more of a content engagement thing rather than acquisition. for SEO, we’ve done a lot of the acquisition part of making sure we try to attract searches and stuff. For engagement, we want to make sure that we’re using all the features on YouTube like end cards, for example, I’m going to show you an example what an end card video would would be like, Oh, hey, you’re still here. I put some more videos to watch. And I like what we have here. But please like and subscribe. But you know, hit the little subscribe button in the bell. Thanks. Or videos.
Katie Robbert 22:57
So Chris, how is that different? So a lot of people would include that in their actual video. And so therefore there wouldn’t be an end card and card would be a duplication. So are you suggesting that people don’t include something like that in their video in order to have something to put in the end card?
Christopher Penn 23:17
No. So that that’s something that you would typically like, depending on the type of video editing you’re doing. That’s just a snip template, a piece that goes to the end of every video, so you wouldn’t have to do it. You don’t have to remember to do it.
Katie Robbert 23:28
But what I’m saying is that people, a lot of times, they don’t include it as a separate video. It’s included in the video, like, if you like what you heard today, like and subscribe the little button down below. And so if, if what you’re suggesting is people stop doing that in their videos, and they can just record at once and start including that as an end as the end card instead.
Christopher Penn 23:51
That’s right, yeah, you would, in your editor, you would do that you would have a template in because you want it to be you know, 11 to 1611 to 20 seconds long, and stuff. So, you know, sometimes, for example, when we’re recording the In-Ear Insights podcast, I forget to mention things and stuff like that. It’s easy, it’s better to have something canned, that is reliable, and it has the motion so that when you do it in YouTube’s editor, you have the you’ll put the pieces where they’re supposed to be on screen pretty easily.
John Wall 24:18
So those recommended videos, though, that’s just always dynamic. There’s no control over the other ones that are going to show on there. Or can you set it up so that it’s going to your you know, stays in your catalog?
Christopher Penn 24:27
Oh, it says you can you can even specify which playlist or if you just want to be a single video so you have a you have options as to what you want to show at the end of your videos to keep people watching because of course, YouTube makes its money on getting people to keep watching. So if you put in a video on your channel that is likely to keep your users engaged, YouTube’s gonna be like cool, we’re going to make sure that the user continues to see these because we want you to keep watching the next time you know that as the next video comes up here comes yet another ad.
John Wall 24:54
Right and it rolls because I’ve seen some screens you know it just comes up with a full checkerboard of 60 videos that are all over But the place but yeah, if it’s your own stuff that’s much better. pal zactly.
Christopher Penn 25:03
Exactly, yeah. And so you want to have that in there. So that’s one of the retention pieces. The other thing to do is to invest some time in the actual channel customization. So let’s go ahead and bring back the Trust Insights channel. Here, let’s go back to YouTube, you get a lot of options for customization. And it’s worth using as many of them as make sense, because, again, these are these are engagement and retention tactics. Some of the basic things that you should do for your channel, we need to do we need to do the intro trailer, which is you know, a 32nd spot. explain to people why they should subscribe. There’s a featured video for returning subscribers. So when somebody comes back to your channel, you could show them a different video, this is a great place to put a call to action to a different property. For example, roll a video there saying hey, if you like what you see here, make sure you sign up for the Trust Insights newsletter, go to Trust insights.ai slash newsletter, and enjoy even more from us. Take the time to add in different sections based on the content you want to have featured most on your page. Again, spend some time and effort to do some branding, you may need to hire some folks to make it look good. If you’re incompetent. At graphic design, you have MS Paint is as good as gets, please hire somebody. Take some time to work a little bit on the channel name description. Again, this is all text we saw in the paper. But any text that’s available is going to make it in here. So we actually probably want to spend some time tuning this up a little bit. Make sure that you add some links relevant links to stuff. So we’ve got four here for our homepage, the contact our podcast or slack community question ad one for the newsletter two. But all these things are just basic configurations that again, a lot of folks don’t spend enough time going in. And from a process perspective probably wouldn’t hurt to check in once a quarter and say like, Is it still up to date.
Katie Robbert 27:04
Because even I’m looking at the description, I’m like, well, that’s not a date. So add that to the list of things to do.
Christopher Penn 27:11
Exactly. And then the other thing to do is to make sure that you are doing as much promotion outside of YouTube of YouTube channel as possible if you want it to be a strategic priority. This is something that, again, I don’t see a ton of people doing. And it really matters because when you get somebody to watch a video, as we were talking about earlier, it enters their watch history. And the more you can be in somebody’s watch history, the more likely this dead guy recommended your stuff again and again. And again. Without that, it, it’s tough because you’re not essentially feeding YouTube what it wants to see. So this is an example. In this week’s Trust Insights newsletter, we had a big old promotion of a video, right, so understand UTM tracking, it’s a free 16 minute tutorial, no form to fill, just watch the thing on YouTube. And it sends somebody to the YouTube this specific YouTube video. But it also includes a fun little trick. So this is this URL parameter at the end called sub confirmation equals one. If somebody is not subscribed to your channel, anytime you send them to your YouTube channel, have that little thing and you’ll see it. For example, down here, are you subscribed to your YouTube channel, click that link. And it will pop up a little subscription box at the moment YouTube. And it will say like, are you do you want to subscribe to this channel? I’m sure this will work because I am updated. Are you sure you wanna subscribe to Trust Insights? Right? So if you’ve got a call to action in your email, you can get some some subscribership this way. So make sure that you’re using outside channels like your newsletter, like your email, even just putting stuff in your email signature is a great way to help to build that viewership and attract people because again, you’re trying to feed that search algorithm.
Katie Robbert 29:07
That makes sense. So Chris, can you go to the YouTube channel itself? So if you go to this Yes, this page. So if you scroll down a little bit, do you have control? So you were talking about customization? Do you have control over what people see? On this homepage? Can you put them in? Can you organize them? Can you put the videos in any kind of an order? Or is it just sort of like randomly you know, if you’ve recorded five videos and uploaded them then people can like I know just get a random assortment of videos like what is that process?
Christopher Penn 29:40
You can you can actually put it in just like uploads and people can see like what you’ve uploaded recently, right? That’s an option. You can put things in by individual playlist. You can put in the your most popular videos to try and and you know show people the things that have people engaged with them past multiple playlists other channels. If you want Highlight and feature other channels. So like on my personal YouTube channel, I have the Trust Insights channel and vice versa trying to cross market as much as we can. You have a whole bunch of different options here. So it really is this question what you want here and then drag and drop to reorder things in sort of the sequence you want them to, you also have the option to change the section contents themselves, or to modify the playlist. So there’s a whole bunch of different things you can do on that page.
Katie Robbert 30:28
So I think that that goes back to your process piece where like, maybe once a quarter, you’re auditing your channel, because you may have evolved in the types of videos that you’re creating. But it’s not completely obvious to you until you go back and look at the videos that you have on your website.
Christopher Penn 30:45
Yep, exactly. Right. So. So from a video SEO perspective, it really is about getting that attention, and then retention, right, we want people to be paying attention to us, we want that, that history, we want to be part of their history want to be as much part of their history as possible. And we want to be part of their history, about their searches and things. So encouraging people to search. This is where having a brand name also really helps. So you know, branded versus unbranded search, it’s good to be found for data analytics and stuff. But also make sure that your channel name is easy enough that somebody can go and find it. Right. So if we start a new incognito thing here,
if somebody doesn’t know who we are, at least we show up for our own name, right? It would be really bad. If I type this in, and there was like, you know, US News and World Report’s consumer Trust Insights report, that would be a bad thing to have happen. So if your company if you experience confusion in regular search for your company name, you may want to name your YouTube channel, something else you may want to name it, you know, data party brought to you by whatever, something that that will show up distinctively in YouTube search.
Katie Robbert 32:11
So Chris, one of the learnings in this episode that we said, and if we covered it, I want to go back to it is we said that the we would be helping people understand the one thing 90% of videos fail to do that impacts your video reach. So what is that one thing,
Christopher Penn 32:28
not using closed captions.
Katie Robbert 32:32
If you take nothing else away from this live stream, that is your pro tip is to turn on those closed caption option for your videos, even if it is a little bit mangled. I know that a lot of the transcription services really sort of jumble up my last name. You know, Chris becomes a whole different person altogether. So those are things that you can fix over time, but definitely at least turn on the feature to start it. Generating on your videos.
Christopher Penn 33:05
Yep. So that concludes that part. We do have an another interesting question from Kyle in here, which you can cover briefly, which is can we talk about how 5g will affect omni channel marketing? Which is an interesting question. You want to take a shot at it first.
John Wall 33:23
You know, everything that I’ve heard about 5g stuff is all more IO t stuff, you know, and so there is some stuff about, you know, the fact that there’s going to be better tracking of personal location, which that seems like a really bad idea for marketing people to be throwing out to the world right now. But that’s one front. Yeah, I really, you know, don’t see much else. Besides, you know, again, if you want to know where all the cameras are, are you walking around inside a store and want to know which aisle to go to, you know, all that location stuff is going to be tighter through the mesh. But that’s everything that you know, the only stuff that I’ve heard, I don’t know, is there anything else out there?
Christopher Penn 34:03
I mean, so here’s the thing. 5g is faster, right? It’s lower latency, so it’s more like Wi Fi. So the idea being that you can have lower power usage, more reach, stuff like that. All that means is that these lovely devices that we’re walking around with all the time and use for everything was used more, right and because you’ll have fewer restrictions, the cost per gigabyte of data use will go down. That said, and this is not a commercial plug, even though I wish it was because I would like him to pay us a lot of money. 5g I don’t think will be nearly as impactful as Elon Musk’s starlink starlink. For those who aren’t aware is a low Earth orbit satellite constellation is going to eventually be like 1000 satellites orbiting the Earth that will deliver good high speed internet access to pretty much anywhere on the surface of the planet. So you You can be, for example, in the middle of Montana, and get the same bandwidth and latency. As somebody, you know, it’s sitting in the heart of New York City that I think will change omni channel marketing much more in the long term than 5g. 5g is great. But you need things like towers to be able to get data to those phones. And those towers have a limited range. Start like you needed a big antenna, it’s like a three foot wide parabolic dish that mounts on top of a building or something. But again, if you’ve got electricity, you could set one of these up and say, and I’m in a remote village in Zimbabwe, and be able to, you know, watch YouTube videos, search stuff on YouTube, but it will enable commerce and connection for a huge swath of the planet where there simply isn’t right now. So that means a lot of the more remote rural areas all around the world, you will allow nations to be able to your entire groups of people who are simply not online, or they are through older edge networks on on last year’s mobile devices, it’s entirely conceivable that a village say, in the middle of Malaysia, in the outer reaches Malaysia, buys an antenna for the village, it’s only the whole village is online. And you know, they’re all watching YouTube, to and checking out cat videos. So I think
Katie Robbert 36:23
I was gonna say, I think you know, what, some of what you’re saying. And this is sort of the, you know, the other sort of reminder for marketers, because there are still companies out there who aren’t doing this is make sure your assets are mobile friendly. Because Chris, if what you’re saying is people are going to spend even more time on their phones. I mean, there’s nothing more frustrating than navigating to a website that isn’t optimized for mobile. And so you’re like, well, forget this, I’m gonna go find a different website that has the same information that is optimized for mobile. And so I think that, you know, to Kyle’s question, how it affects marketing in general is you got to make sure your stuff works on a phone period, you have to make sure that your images work for desktop and mobile, you need to make sure that your content is easily readable on mobile, you need to make sure that your websites are mobile optimized, if you have a mobile app, you need to make sure that the experience is really, really easy. Because consumers, they get frustrated, within point few seconds, and we’ll just move on, they won’t bother to try to work it out with you or try to figure out like, well, if I do this, can I do this, they will leave you a really crappy review that will follow you everywhere. And they will go find your competitor who did think about mobile first. Exactly.
Christopher Penn 37:43
I would strongly encourage people go into your Google Analytics. This should be part of your process anyway, right? Go into Google Analytics and look at the places that are sending you traffic right. So let’s take a look real quickly at the Trust Insights one here, right, here’s here’s us a year to date. India is the third largest nation sending us traffic, right? The UK, Finland, Australia, and these, you know, it’s not zero people, there’s a couple 100 people from each of these locations China, Brazil, part of omni channel marketing to think about is is there a market in these places? Right? I this is currently set to ecommerce if I switch this to all goals. Not only are we getting traffic, we’re getting some conversion. So a lot of these are like you know, subscribe to the newsletter, which is totally fine. But it’s not zero, right? Getting conversions from Brazil getting conversions from the Netherlands. So a big part of 5g and starlink and omni channel all this stuff is actually saying, do we have a market outside of the place that we live right now? Is it a viable market? And should we be considering any marketing efforts there? Right, if Australia is sending us 369 users this year so far? Should we be marketing to Australia? Should we have some localized content is that worth thinking about? That opens up a whole other discussion about me a multinational marketing, but the very least be looking at your data to say, if you do serve outside of your service area, and you know, these technologies are coming? Do you have a long term strategy in place to just start addressing those things?
Katie Robbert 39:22
I think that that makes a lot of sense. Because you really do a meet it goes back to what are your business goals? And so and what is your business plan in general? You know, are you set up to serve globally? Or are you only set up to serve, you know, whatever country you’re based in, and so it really forces you to revisit those questions. We’ve been fortunate enough to be getting inbounds from Australia and New Zealand in the recent months. But we very quickly realized that it created some challenges with trying to actually get on the phone because of the time difference and so this Thinking about having your structure like, what happens if I have a client? Who is 12? hours ahead? How do I handle that? Do I hire a specific team to be always on 24? Seven, you know, so those, I think that, you know, back to the question about 5g and opening it up more globally, it will force you to start to think about things in terms of your business structure, and your team structure that you may not have to consider at the moment.
Christopher Penn 40:28
Exactly. And going back to YouTube to sort of close the loop there. One of the things you can do with YouTube is you can provide closed captions in multiple languages. So if you see a country that’s sending you a lot of traffic, and it’s, you know, not the native language, you can hire somebody to help you transcribe it, translate it, and then load captions for more than one language, and YouTube and you could see, can we attract some interest in India or Bahrain or Argentina, wherever you’re getting your traffic from? Who knows put up some videos with with alternate translations available and see if that gives you any additional traction, maybe opens up a market on YouTube that you didn’t realize you had.
Katie Robbert 41:10
So Chris, this is might be a little bit off topic, but related to YouTube. So you had mentioned that Google Analytics removed the ability to integrate YouTube directly in to your data. This might be a different episode, or a future topic that we cover. But would it make sense to then create a YouTube channel grouping or include YouTube in your social channels?
Christopher Penn 41:33
It depends, I would say it depends on your strategy. Right? If YouTube is incidental, it probably doesn’t make sense to just lump it in with social media, right? Or referral traffic depends on how you want to find social. If you’re investing substantial amounts of time and effort in YouTube, it might not hurt to make it its own thing. Because you want to see is it is it having a trend. And that said, the source mediums are always going to be pretty clear. One thing that’s very nice is because it’s owned by Google, it shows up in Google Analytics quite nicely. So that you don’t have to worry about a whole lot about tagging there, you do want to make sure that you’re using UTM tags, like in the YouTube channel descriptions and stuff if you got a call to action, so that you are guaranteeing that those clicks come through to your website, Google Analytics as clear as possible. But you don’t worry about YouTube itself.
Katie Robbert 42:24
So I think that sort of wraps up the show for today. So to go back to the original points. So what understanding YouTube’s algorithms Video SEO, it is not good enough to just create a video and upload it to YouTube and hope for the best. You need to be treating YouTube as a full content strategy, rolling it into your larger content strategy, advertising your YouTube videos on other digital channels like social in your email on your website, and getting other people to also reshare your videos making sure that the videos are accessible, making sure that you turn on closed captions, making sure that you have those transcripts of the videos themselves. There’s a lot that goes into a really good well rounded YouTube strategy. So if you’re just uploading videos to YouTube, and hoping for the best, we’re gonna go ahead and say you’re doing it wrong.
Christopher Penn 43:18
Exactly. And yeah, we’ll cover Brian had one more question. We’ll cover that maybe in an upcoming issue of the newsletter, but thanks for tuning in. Folks, we’ll talk to you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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