YouTube just announced the next generation of their video analytics feature which uses the same data as the old Insights tool. To be honest, not much has changed apart from an interface design upgrade but it's nice to see that this has become a focus again and we can only hope this will get included into Google Analytics at some stage.

Check out the video stats from our recent AFL Grand Final Twitter data visualisation to get an overview of what's on offer in the new youtube.com/analytics tool. As you can see we're certainly not a video production house and don't get millions of views but the AFL video was a nice spike for us - never had more than a hundred views before!

The data shows us that the majority of views originated in Australia and came mostly from males between 25-54 (surprise surprise). Interesting to see is that mobile was much bigger than anticipated with almost 25% of views. I really love the video retention reports though, they're are awesome to optimise your actual video content (and I hope more companies will start using this to improve their TV ads). In the case of our AFL video you can see that we have a fairly steady drop-off of total viewers during the video but compared to the average (which is great benchmarking data) are actually doing pretty well in getting viewers to watch the video to the very end. 

Read the YouTube analytics guide for a more detailed explanation of the various reports.

On my recent visit to ad:tech in Singapore I came across the Global Web Index which I thought was rather cool. Check out the below infographics showing the state of global state of social networking. 

According to the vendor, the study is based on a global survey which will soon expand to over 120,000 participants and 36 markets (i.e. we don't know what the below is based on for now). The overlapping circles in the below chart shows the number of social networkers in each market by type: Messagers, groupers and content sharers. Have a look at the US and China, quite a different profile.

The use cases Global Web Index suggests below sound a bit made up, but I still thinks this is awesome data that can definitely help shape social media strategies for different markets around the world.

1. Discover the online behaviour of your target audience

I just came across the PostRank social analytics platform and I have to say I'm pretty impressed, social media analytics on steroids for bloggers! It only took me a few minutes to get the account up and running, connect it to our blog and various social profiles including Google Analytics and get the first insights (with retrospective data).

Have a look at the screen shots below and you see how content posted on our blog turned into post engagements outside our website, what blog posts have the highest engagement rating rather than just traffic, where else our content was shared and what our top performing blog post of all time were. Very cool. And best of all, it's free so get an account now!

If you're into data analysis and visualisation but not quite ready to invest in one of the more professional business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Spotfire (contact us if you want to find out more), then you should check out Google Fusion Tables.

Apart from being free (all you need is a Google account), Google Fusion Tables allows you to import your data, visualise it using a slection of charts (the interactive maps are especially cool, see below) and publish reports on your own website that users can interact with via filters. Have a look at the below fusion table from the WHO on global tuberculosis control and hover over some of the countries.

Hamish just came across this awesome piece of software called Eureqa that helps to detect equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. 

The goal of the free tool from the Cornell Creative Machines Lab is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data. Check out the introduction vide below!