If you choose to make YouTube videos as a part of your marketing strategy, consequently you will invest your time, a lot of effort and authenticity into video’s creation for your YouTube channel.
In this case, in order to get the most out of YouTube, you should use YouTube Analytics for valuable things, such as metrics to measure and improve performance of your channel.
It is noticed that some of social media marketers are too addicted to insights, it means that they track too many metrics. Usually they think that if there is an attractive percentage near a marketing campaign, then it is producing the results. However, in most cases it better to select several metrics that are more revealing and track just them.
Have you ever used YouTube Analytics before?
If not, then it is the same as performing blindly. Every time you try to guess which topic to choose in order to make video entertaining. When video is already uploaded you hope that it will encourage YouTube viewers to engage with it. Briefly, you are crossing the fingers each time while posting a new video on YouTube.
And the worst part of it is that instead of analyzing the efficiency of your actions and improving your YouTube performance, you are probably making the same mistakes over and over again.
Remember that you should not be afraid to figure out what you are doing wrong because knowledge is power.
That’s why today we will learn about 5 key metrics of YouTube Analytics and how to analyze them in order to achieve success in your YouTube strategy.
Sounds good, isn’t it?
Let’s begin!
1. Watch time
Although without doubts it can be said that Views are a significant metric to track in order to determine the success of your YouTube, but they don’t show you the whole picture.
Don’t miss: 12 Tips to Get More YouTube Video Views
Views as a fundamental insight can’t give you enough information to make effective improvements to your YouTube video strategy because billion of views are not necessarily considered as a fact that the users liked, engaged with your YouTube content. All they show is that either a user pressed the play button or a video automatically started to play.
Instead, taking the raw views, it’s better to concentrate on another more significant metric – Watch Time. From YouTube’s perspective, watch time means the estimated total amount of minutes users have spent viewing your videos. Actually, watch time indicates how valuable and engaging your video is.
This metric is so important, because according to the watch time, YouTube platform ranks not only single videos but channels as well. The more watch time a video has, the higher in search results and recommendations section it appears. YouTube algorithm presumes that a video with higher watch time is more engaging.
In updated YouTube Analytics the whole section is dedicated to watch time report where you can easily see the amount of time your all videos have gathered. What it is more, there you can classify your videos by watch time or group them by, for example, lengths, topics in order to find out what are the most engaging type of videos on your YouTube channel.
2. Traffic sources
While analyzing your video performance, it is important to know where your YouTube channel’s viewers are coming from.
In this case, the traffic sources’ section presents you how users found your videos. Also it shows which traffic sources are the most beneficial to you. However, paying attention only to the number of views these sources generate is a mistake because not all sources provide you the same quality of traffic.
For instance, if your video is getting the high quality views from YouTube search, then you may start to think about the ways how to optimize your videos to appear in search results for the keywords YouTube users can use while searching for a valuable content.
Use this metric in order to understand which traffic sources are important to your YouTube channel and later on this will improve your video promotion strategy.
3. Audience demographics
For better understanding of your YouTube audience, use the demographics report suggested by YouTube Analytics. This section presents you a graphical information about people who watch your videos, using segments like age, gender, geography and etc.
All this data helps you to understand who your most engaged audience is and which users you actually need to target.
If you notice that according to YouTube Analytics you are not reaching the users you want, let’s say you was concentrated on teenagers, but after getting YouTube Analytics data, you find out that the biggest audience who watch your videos is women aged 35 and more. In this case, it is suggested to change your strategy and later cover topics of your videos that will be entertaining for teenagers.
Here the quote of the marketing expert, Seth Godin, fits well. He said, “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”
After examination of your YouTube fans demographics, it will be easier for you to adjust your efforts to desires of your target audience.
4. Audience retention
Monitoring the number of views over some periods is useful, however, it is more important to evaluate the quality of views. In audience retention page, you are able to review the percentage of users who viewed your video and when they stopped watching it. According to this data, you may find out the exact time when you lost the attention of your YouTube viewers and what the reasons of leaving your video were.
In audience retention report you can see two sections: the absolute audience retention curve which shows how well your videos maintain viewers and the relative retention curve which lets to compare how one of your videos keeps viewers against other YouTube videos of similar length.
Actually, YouTube ranks videos better with higher audience retention because it thinks that these videos may draw viewers’ attention.
Tracking this metric should help you to understand mistakes of your performance and improve in the future or on the contrary, you can figure out the most entertaining video parts and use the same tactic in the following videos.
However, you can only see the analytics for one video, not for the whole YouTube channel.
5. YouTube Subscribers’ growth
YouTube subscribers in other words are considered as your loyal fans. These people are interested in your content. Number of subscribers is significant metric to your channel because when YouTube sends users the notification about your new content, they see your video more frequently on their homepage and consequently it helps to generate more views.
Don’t miss: 5 Effective Ways to Get More YouTube Subscribers
It is obvious that subscribers view your YouTube videos more often than non-subscribers, in this case, the bigger amount of subscribers your YouTube channel has, the higher watch time your videos receive and raise your channel in search rankings.
Subscribers’ report shows you the quantity of subscribers you gained or lost during certain periods. According to this data, you can realize what video topics seem informative and entertaining to users and what strategies to implement in the future in order to increase subscribers’ number.
In conclusion, all marketers will agree that insights is like a gift that shouldn’t be ignored. Otherwise, you will be performing without knowing what you are doing wrong and what gives you success.
Actually, there are more metrics offered by YouTube Analytics that can be tracked in order to evaluate your channel’s performance. Today we reviewed only 5 of them which we think matters the most.
Remember, YouTube algorithm ranks videos with high watch time and good audience retention.
If you are using other metrics of YouTube Analytics that help you to grow your channel, let us know in comments’ field below!
