Using YouTube Hot Spots To Help Improve Your Attorney Videos

With the growing number of attorney videos appearing on websites and social media, attorneys are increasingly beginning to ask how effective they really are. Website and YouTube analytics provide a good tertiary read on the usual views and click through data but they still fail to tell us what we really want to know about our videos such as:

• How long should a video typically run before I lose my audience?
• Do people want to see me, pictures, or both?
• How do my videos compare to other competing videos?
• How well do my videos retain the viewing audience?
• What can I learn from my previous videos that will help educate me on how to improve my future videos?

In the past, most of these questions left people guessing but with the recent release of YouTube’s “Hot Spots” reporting tool, you can now find many of the answers you need

What Is YouTube Hot Spots?

YouTube Hot Spots are a new reporting tool located on the lower-left of your YouTube Insight report for each of your videos…hosted on YouTube of course. This report now allows you to see such how your videos are received by viewers throughout the course of the video. The metrics provided are compared to thousands of other videos on YouTube of similar length for comparison – you cannot segment by attorney videos only. Instead, you may be competing against the sensational video of the monkey scratching his behind with millions of views…so don’t get too caught up in the overall comparisons.

As noted above, you can now see how people are reacting and behaving when watching your videos. If your video has not yet received 300-600 views, chances are you will need more views to produce the data you need to see this report. In short, as if YouTube’s ranking algorithm involving total views was not enough for you, this is yet another excuse to stream your YouTube videos through all of your web properties.

What Can You Learn From Hot Spots?

After reviewing a number of attorney videos through Hot Spots, I have seen a few patterns that are worth repeating including:

• People tend to high higher viewership at those times of a video when nice visuals and images are used in place of a talking head. This may not be welcome news to a narcissist but apparently people react differently to images than people
• People tend to have higher levels of viewership at the beginning and ends of a video. This could be the result of user fast forwarding but also could indicate that shorter videos are more favored
• It is a good idea to place your call to actions at those times with the highest level of viewer interest

YouTube Hot Spot reporting is still in its infancy but could very well become the new “heat map” for video effectiveness moving forward. Since people are more inclined to watch than read online, this may be yet another valuable tool to help you improve your attorney marketing efforts online.

If you would like to learn more about lawyer search engine optimization and marketing online, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm today to see how we can help you.