These sessions were delivered by Googlers at their London offices – worth going for the chance to work in an indoor rowing boat.

YouTube

  • Watch time is the most important metric
  • Think about what else people watch when they get there, if you just have repeating hero videos they will eventually diminish in organic results and don’t make for a good user experience
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of subscribers to your channel
  • There’s a positive correlation between people watching more and longer
  • CTA – subscribe / other
  • Use other features to drive subscriptions
  • Joined up approach
  • Playlists – not other versions of the same film!
  • Benchmark yourself against similar charities
  • What you’re competing for is people’s time
  • Incorporate and keep on top of what other people are doing
  • Don’t start from scratch each time
  • Reductio ad absurdum works
  • Segment them once they get there
  • Have a working process for YT
  • ‘Manage it’ rather than have every team using it as a filing system
  • Iterative process – if you do everything at once you won’t know what works
  • Plan the content journey
  • Think about SEO, it’s the second biggest search engine so good titles and meta data are a must
  • Have things in a series – content people can watch out for on a regular basis
  • This hasn’t shifted yet, even with an on demand change in culture
  • Use different media to promote your YT content

Actionable now:

  • A brand channel trailer
  • Keep content up to date or it risks looking like we haven’t posted for a couple of years
  • Make sure logo is avatar
  • Feature content from other YouTubers
  • “Mental health is really big on YouTube” – feature vloggers (guest posts)
  • 401 show – also talk about mental health
  • Titles and thumbnails – it’s been on the list for ages, we really need to do it
  • Crib sheet for uploading to get teams to think about this
  • Always think about branding
  • Can use branding in the thumbnail too, so it works without text
  • e.g. have a twibbon-style logo image on the thumbnail frame
  • Use cards to link people between YT and your website
  • Adwords for video
  • Brand lift survey – they survey people within a control group, brand recall, search lift
  • Have one KPI you want to reach “if nothing else”
  • Encourage comments and celebrate them afterwards – read them out, etc / card, annotation
  • Annotations still aren’t visible on mobile
  • Cards is actually a replacement to annotations, so use that
  • Dedicate time to comment moderation
  • Look at audience retention report
  • Need a YouTube taskforce – regular content, SEO, watcher journey, meta data, amplifying other voices
  • Trends – seasonal activity and mh topics, moving our content around to adapt
  • Childline UK is a good example of engagement and amplification
  • Life skills another good example
  • Think about the long term place of each video you upload
  • Think about encouraging subscribers – perhaps with an overlay CTA

Top three advertising tips:

1) Brand lift survey
2) Remarketing
3) Google trends

Google Analytics:

  • Look at cancer.org
  • Top tasks focus
  • People are looking for ‘hints’ on where they should go
  • Use segment builder so see how a group of people act within a defined group
  • Custom dimensions means we can see who has taken more than one action – customising GA for you
  • Can export those segments to Google ad words and then remarket just to those people via GDN
  • They appear in the secondary dimensions area
  • Regex
  • Content grouping – so looking at all pages under a certain category
  • Then within that you could look at the custom dimensions e.g. how many women are looking at diagnoses (Good for our quarterly reporting on media pages)
  • Works better with content flows – e.g. men looking at red shoes
  • You can have up to 5 groups
  • Do a test view first
  • Use campaign tracking – utm parameters
  • Separate brand terms from diagnosis
  • Trace the source of our self referals – make sure UA code is everywhere
  • Don’t worry if remains less than 1%
  • Bounce rate -it’s more than high bad / low good, what are they there for, did they find it?
  • Segment downloads into groups, rather than having thousands of PDF urls
  • You can do remarketing through GA, based on campaign tagging / segments
  • Google consumer surveys – ask followup questions after users take an action
  • Share custom reports with other teams – they can pull them into their GA accounts
  • Use Google sharing gallery for useful tips from Googlers and users