Google Rolls Out New Video, Image Search Features; Tests Banner Ads in SERPs?

Anyone using YouTube for business purposes has a nice, new analytics tool at your disposal: data that shows the popularity of your videos down to the second. Talk about getting granular with analytics.

It’s called “Hot Spots,” and Google announced it yesterday as an extension to the YouTube Insights analytics tool.

The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine “hot” and “cold” spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

Sounds pretty nifty to me. You’ll find Hot Spots on its own tab under the Insights Dashboard.

Meanwhile, Noah Mallin at SearchViews has posted about a new test Google appears to be doing in the Image Search SERPs: showing banner ads at the bottom, between the image thumbnails and the navigation links. Since I can’t reproduce the test, here’s one of the images from Noah’s post:

More Google Image Search news: Over at Google Operating System, Alex Chitu finds a new feature available on Google’s Image Search: the ability to restrict your search to photographs. If you’re looking for photos and don’t want to sort through logos, screenshots, and so forth, look for the “Content Types” option on Google’s Advanced Image Search page.

On a related note, Phil Bradley has a good comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of image search on the major search engines.