How to use YouTube analytics to grow your channel?
Building a must-see YouTube channel starts, with understanding your audience. And there’s no better place to gather actionable insights than your YouTube analytics. Let’s find out, what all is included in YouTube analytics and how utilizing these reports, can help you improve your marketing efforts.
“YouTube Analytics!”
Want to know which of your videos are binge-worthy? Curious where the bulk of your viewers are coming from? Well, the answers are just a few clicks away. That’s why, we put together in this video, breaking down the core pillars of YouTube Analytics, including: General Reports, Watch Time and Audience Reports, Engagement Reports, Earning Reports.
General Reports: If you’re trying to view YouTube Analytics for the first time, simply visit the YouTube Analytics page directly. Alternatively, you can click on the “Analytics” tab in YouTube studio.
The Overview Report: This report is a high level summary of your videos most recent performance, easy to understand at a glance, the Overview report tells whether or not your numbers are up. Looking at engagement metrics, such as watch time and views, give a simplified snapshot of your overall performance.
The Real-time Report: This report shows you, an estimate of view count data for your most recent videos, including people-watching in real-time. If you’re pushing out video content on a frequent basis, this report can let you know, if any new videos are experiencing a spike in engagement. The Real-time Report displays two graphs; one hour-by-hour, and the other minute-by-minute. Both graphs refer to viewer’s local time zones.
The Watch Time Report: This report aggregates data from all view sources, to create a comprehensive breakdown of viewer retention. These sources include the YouTube homepage, the Platform’s embedded player, and the mobile YouTube app. You can also compare watch time data for individual videos.
The Audience Retention Report: This report helps you understand, whether or not, your viewers are sticking to your videos. Beyond big picture trends, the absolute audience retention curve lets you see, which parts of the video are most popular. You can also use a relative audience retention, to see how your video compares to YouTube videos of similar length. Retention further breaks down by organic traffic, traffic for paid skippable video ads and traffic for paid display ads.
The Playback Locations Report: This report is interesting if you work with collaborators or partners. Here you can see, where your videos are being played, either natively on YouTube or embedded elsewhere. Simply put, playback reporting highlights where users are viewing your videos, while the traffic sources are how people find your content. The noteworthy metrics of this report include:
- YouTube Watch Page
- YouTube Channel Page
- YouTube Other
- Embedded in External Websites and
- Apps
The Traffic Sources Report: It shows the sites and YouTube features that viewers use to find your content. Understanding whether viewers are searching directly on YouTube, clicking the suggested video thumbnails or following links from social networks lets you know, if your optimization and promotion strategies are paying off.
The Devices Report: This report gives you information, on the different devices-including PCs, mobile, tablet, game consoles, and TVs-and operating systems that viewers used to watch your videos. This data can better inform both your advertising and outreach strategies.
Engagement Reports: YouTube video analytics can be split into various reporting metrics include: likes, dislikes, comments, subscriptions, sharing. These metrics are prioritized based on the types of content you’re creating.
The Subscribers Report: This report is YouTube’s equivalent, outlining how you’ve gained and lost subscribers across different pieces of content, locations and dates. In short, this report quite literally tells you, which content is scoring subscribers, and where they’re coming from. You can also see, where you lost subscribers as well.
The Likes and Dislikes Report: It shows the net change of likes and dislikes in your video. It adds up the number of likes and dislikes, minus the number of likes and dislikes removed.
The Videos in Playlists Report: This report shows you how many times your videos were added to or removed from viewer’s playlists.
The Comments Report: This report summarizes how many people comment on your video. Just like social comments, the YouTube comments section represents a place, to go back-and-forth with the audience.
The Sharing Report: This report shows, how many times your content has been shared, through the “Share” button on YouTube, as well as other sites like Facebook or Twitter.
The Cards Report: This report shows you, how viewers are interacting with cards on your videos across desktop, mobile and tablets.
The Estimated Earnings Report: This report details earnings related to partner content, transactions, YouTube Red and ads.
The Ad Rates Report: This report determines; how different ad types perform over time compared to one another. A few noteworthy metrics within the report include:
- Ad type
- Ad Impressions
- Monetized Playbacks:
- The number of instances when a viewer plays your video and sees at least one ad impression. A Monetized Playback is counted if a viewer is shown a pre-roll ad, but quits watching the ad before your video ever starts. Playback based CPM).
“Are you using YouTube analytics, to grow your channel?”
We get it: There’s a lot, to take in! But analyzing your channels numbers is crucial, not only for improving your current content, but figuring out what to create in the future. Thank you! See you, in the next video lesson.
