Sales results from getting 3 million views on YouTube
Dream of having a video of your product in front of millions of viewers? I recently had that dream come true. Without any active effort on my part, Candy Japan got randomly contacted by a YouTube channel with 300k subscribers.
Just as a quick summary of what the business is, it's a subscription club where you get random Japanese candy delivered to you twice a month.
So did I become an instant millionaire with the sales that YouTube video drove to the business?
As you can see, it ended up getting over 3 million views.
How I got featured on the channel
Here's how it happened. Roughly the following email came in (I just changed it a bit, since I have no permission to quote the actual email).
"We have a channel on YouTube which reviews candy, with over 60 million views 150k views per day. Our candy reviewing segment is one of the most popular shows on YouTube.
We think Candy Japan would be perfect for our show. Would you be interested in providing a review sample of your box?"
Since I happened to be around right then, I could shoot back an answer immediately and we got things moving quickly.
YouTube viewer stats
I shipped them a review box (they credit us in the description) just a month later the video was up. Here are the statistics from YouTube for the video:
While the video has no actual link to the Candy Japan website, it mentions the site name in large letters in the video. That means the only way people could navigate to the site would be by typing in the URL directly, so all traffic should show up as direct views in Google Analytics.
Results
In the statistics for the video, you can see daily views double from around 12000 to 24000. If the video was truly having a big impact, there should be a noticeable jump in views when the jump happens. Here's a screenshot from Google Analytics. Around the middle the big jump should occur.
Amazing, isn't it?
Actually, nothing happened. The chart looks rather flat. In the middle there should be a huge jump when daily video views doubled. I know the source for the slight spike in the end and it has nothing to do with YouTube (it was an image with a watermark posted on Reddit).
Conclusion(s)
Is YouTube a wasted effort, everyone is just channel surfing and not actually out to go away from YouTube? Without a link from the video description, even a very popular video will not necessarily drive direct visits. Conversions are not showing any jump either.
Maybe this video just had a really poor audience from a sales point of view. At least this shows it is not a given that a really popular video will drive sales or even any noticeable amount of visits. Some of you have complained that my blog posts sometimes have a downer ending. Sorry to disappoint, but reality doesn't always make for an upbeat story!