Deep in the catacombs beneath the German Village an inquisitive group of video optimization wisdom-seekers happened upon an oracular YouTubian dispensing analytical knowledge to all comers…

Or… in the well-lit and comfortable confines of Brick An American Kitchen, our July meeting with Tim Schmoyer of the Video Creators Channel was lively and informative!

Tim covered the important but often overlooked methods of measuring and improving our video efforts. YouTube is the second largest search engine around and its content is included in search results from the first, so it’s not enough to just upload any old video and hope that it gets found, because it probably won’t. We learned about the importance of video thumbnails, titles, and engaging with our viewers in order to try and improve our visibility in YouTube.

We also saw some of the video engagement metrics that YouTube provides to us as video creators and what kind of sense we can start making out of those metrics.

Are our users bailing out after just a few seconds? It’s not TV, it’s a “lean in” platform where users have their fingers on the back button. Why are there more than 100 percent of viewers retained at the start of the video? (Apparently that’s from users starting the video over again). We additionally learned to stop using the word “modules” (but only if our analytics tell us to!).

Tim’s slides:

And an intro video from his channel:

Thanks to Tim and everyone who made it out, see you all next time!