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.

Over the AFL Grand Final weekend we were pretty busy doing a Twitter data visualisation for an article by the Herald Sun but there's so much more in this data set that we decided to write a follow-up post as well.

Have a look at the below video or the interactive Tableau dashboard behind it, showing volume of Twitter mentions for the different AFL teams over a period of time leading up to the Grand Final. Further down are some screenshots of the Ross Lyon (St Kilda coach) incident, in which he was accused of stabbing his predecessor Mark Harvey in the back for the position of coach at the Freemantle club - the whole story was actively discussed on Twitter as you can see.

The video (and dashboard) present what we call 'Twitter Time', all Tweets broken up into chunks of 400 and then analysed. As the chunks of Tweets (blue lines) are visualised, time will slow down at moments when the volume of Tweets was high, particularly at match dates (green circles) or at the Grand Final (dark green circle). The jersey size is proportional to the number of Tweets mentioning a particular team, and you'll notice that they go gray once they are eliminated from the series. The analysis was run on about 35,000 Tweets provided by Alterian's SM2 social media analytics platform.

Below is the breakdown of the Twitter chatter and mentions of key players, and most importantly coaches, from the time Ross Lyon announced that he was resigning and rumours started about his move to Freemantle (15th and 16th September). All Tweets were analysed for instances of player or coach names. Rumours pop up and die as Twitter volume rises and falls.

Above: Hawthorn vs Sydney & West Coast vs Carlton normal match chatter on Twitter.

Above: rumours of Ross Lyon's move to Freemantle and sacking of Mark Harvey explode on Twitter after Ross Lyon officially resigns. His move to Freemantle is confirmed on the 16th of September.

Above: Neil Craig becomes the topic of conversation as well as it is rumoured he might go to St. Kilda.

Above: AFL fans move on and resume normal match chatter ...

Ever wondered what kind of data WCM (Web Content Management) systems collect on individual visitors? Well, usually not much (or not in a readily accessible format anyway) but SiteCore is the exception! 

SiteCore stores all campaign response and visitor behaviour in a MS SQL database that can easily be accessed using standard BI tools such as Tableau. Have a look at the below video to see just how easy it is to connect to the database in order to create custom reports and interactive dashboards from your web analytics data.

Check out the below TED video in which Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.

To download the tool and start developing your own Pivots simply using Excel just visit the official website www.getpivot.com (and buy a new powerful computer).

The Excel developer tool can be downloaded here

Thanks for prompting us to write about this @ianlyons!

• Data is coming to the top of the agenda for many marketers, why is that?
• What are the key challenges in achieving a great data management plan?
• How should marketers go about deciding between paid vs. free analytics tools?

For more information on the upcoming ad:tech session content visit the official ad:tech website or read our earlier blog post announcing the session panelists.

Below are two of our key slides to further explain what I'm talking about in the interview. Part of Datalicious's service proposition is about A) helping companies to determine what their data can be used for at different stages of the customer life cycle (or the customer data journey as we call it)

as well as B) helping companies to move through the different stages of their corporate data journey and the resulting changes in technology, resources and processes requirements.

Email me at cbartens@datalicious.com if you have any questions or want to find out how we could help your company.