YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches.* Link Below

Pure Visibility is getting ready to launch videos on a couple of our client’s websites as well as our own site. I have a background in film, so I have fallen into the role of “video guy” and have the task of helping clients get their videos online. Even though I am a directed and produced many independent films, creating and posting website videos is a different challenge.

Some of the questions I encountered were: How should the content differ? Where should I host the video? Where should I place it on the website? How can I measure the effectiveness? We are just getting started in the world of video and I have not answered a lot of these questions, but I am starting with what I know about online advertising by starting with identifying goals.

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Last month I attended Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Chicago and a recurring theme throughout the week was universal search/blended search and how to leverage it for your online marketing campaigns. In particular I attended 3 panel discussions on online video and in each session universal search was a hot topic. The big takeaway I got was that if you don’t have any videos online and indexed by the search engines then you are missing out on a lot of potential, qualified visitors to your site.

Universal search means the search engines show results with not only blue text links, but a blend of results from images, video, local listings, news, and text links. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, if you search for “elmo” you get image results, videos, and text links. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have versions of the universal search results and search marketers are observing a trend of more and more people skipping over text links in favor of clicking on other rich media like video or images.

One case study that was explained in the “Video SEO” presentation was about a cosmetic dentist in Sunnyvale who sees a 16% conversion rate from people that contact him after watching his online video, compared to a 3-4% conversion rate from those who find him from a paid or organic text link. In addition this particular dentist increased his search engine visibility, when a user types “emergency cosmetic dentist sunnyvale” in Google, he owns the number 1 organic spot with his youtube video. Having the video allowed this dentist to appear 3 times above the fold because he had a paid listing, a local listing, and a video listing. This is what we mean by starting to “own page one” because he owns multiple place on the first page of search engine results which greatly increases the likelihood that potential patients will find him.

A lot of the people at SES including myself agreed that video is the wave of the future online and the fact that youtube is starting to beat Yahoo in the number of monthly searches only validates this assumption. My prediction is that in the new wave of search engine marketing you will not be able to survive only on a paid search account with text links. Companies will need to have a universal online marketing approach utilizing paid search, good search engine optimization (SEO), press releases, a social media strategy and different online media like video, images. The days of surviving on simply having good SEO and a high ranking for a few terms is over.

This evening Barack Obama is going to spend between four and five million dollars to air a thirty minute ad on three major networks nationwide. Not since Ross Perot in 1992 has a candidate spent so much money to reach so many people at the same time.

But, in fact, Barack Obama has reached the equivalent of ten times that many people over the last year, and his campaign has essentially done it for free. How? YouTube.

This wonderful post by Salon’s Cyrus Farivar ties together a number of threads about the influence YouTube had on the 2008 election cycle. Citing a number of different sources, he comes to the conclusion that the total number of hours of YouTube videos with pro-Obama political content was over fourteen MILLION HOURS.

To put that another way, YouTube gave Obama’s campaign the equivalent of fourteen hours of television viewing time for every person in Denver.

McCain was a distant second, with only the equivalent of about half a million hours of viewing. This massive deficit is striking for two reasons. First, it means that Obama supporters are posting a lot more videos. Secondly, and more importantly, a lot more people are watching them. If engagement is a measure of a brand, Obama’s brand is solidly in the lead on YouTube.

How much would this exposure be worth in terms of television? Well, using media buyer price points, Micah Sifry calculated that the value of the advertising would be around $46,893,000.

Taking one more step back, even though Obama’s campaign is currently taking in jaw-dropping amounts of campaign contributions, $46MM is more than the campaign received in eight of the last twelve months. To put it another way, Obama’s presence on YouTube was worth a month’s worth of fundraising.

These kind of social media multipliers are the kind of thing that internet marketing is supposed to promise, and Obama’s campaign has found a way to make it deliver. So, even though tonight’s message will potentially be seen by nearly a hundred million Americans, you can be sure that far more will end up watching it on YouTube–at not a penny of additional cost for Barack Obama’s campaign.