How YouTube Analytics Enables You to Understand & Measure Progress

YouTube Analytics puts a lot of power into your hands. I’m sure most video creators do not know how beneficial this tool is.

With YouTube Analytics, you can find out those who are watching your videos. You can also find out which of your videos is the best-performing.

In fact, this tool can help you learn more about your audience, track performance, and measure progress. You’ve just got to know how it works, and how best to use it for your video marketing.

That said, I’ll be providing you with some of the most essential features of YouTube Analytics. And some tips on how you can better use these features to improve your business.

But first, let me explain to you why you should use YouTube, and not any other video sharing platform.

Why You Should Use YouTube

Before tossing the lid off YouTube Analytics, let’s see why YouTube is the best option for your video marketing.

And that’s because there are lots of available options to choose from if you want to publish videos. YouTube is the largest platform for broadcasting video in terms of viewers and video content.

The platform boasts of nearly 2 billion monthly active users watching all kinds of videos on YouTube.

It is the second-largest search engine (Google being the largest) that is on the internet in terms of search intent and also user base.

In case you didn’t know, YouTube is also a social media platform, making it the second largest. On the whole, more than 5 billion videos have been uploaded on YouTube to date.

If I’m correct with my math, we’re talking about one-third of the world’s population tuning in to YouTube every month. Quite impressive!

So, if you decide to use YouTube for your video marketing, you should know it’s a smart move you’re making.

How You Can Take Advantage of YouTube

Creating a high-quality video can be so consuming – research keywords and tags, create descriptions and put it all together.

With all these optimizations, it’s important you monitor the video to know how well it is doing. You can find out the level of engagement that your video is enjoying with your audience.

And to do that, you will have to log in to your YouTube Studio. After logging in, click on “Analytics”. You can now see your dashboard on which the total view time, top videos, and the latest videos are displayed.

Clicking on any of your videos will reveal all stats about it. From this point, let’s go over the YouTube Analytics features one after the other.

1 – Views

Once you’re logged into YouTube Analytics, the first information before you is the overall performance of your channel.

You will also find out how popular your videos are to your audience. The other details about your videos and channel are:

• Watch time – This is used to measure the total amount of time viewers have spent watching your videos. It is arrived at by adding all the seconds, minutes, and hours that have been spent on your YouTube videos
• Views – This is a measurement of the total number of viewers that have clicked on your video links to watch.  There is no indication of whether these viewers really watched the videos on your channel
• Average View Duration – It gives you an idea of how much time is spent by viewers watching your videos. If your viewers do not watch your videos till the end, you will find out from this metric.

Here is 18 Tips on How to Get Free YouTube Views

2 – Demographics

From the YouTube Analytics dashboard, you will be able to access insights into the demographics of your viewers. Find out from which country they are watching from and their gender.

This feature is very useful for brands with physical locations for their business. The insights from their demographics will tell if their videos are being watched by their target audience.

If the answer is positive, then efforts will be intensified to improve the reach. Insights like these generally help brands position themselves very well in order to reach more of their target audience.

Go Here to See How YouTube Analytics Enables You to Understand & Measure Progress

3 – Traffic Sources

Traffic sources give you a clear picture of where viewers are finding your videos.

Details from the traffic sources will be useful in tweaking your YouTube SEO. You can decide to intensify efforts on a particular traffic source.

For example, you may have been paying for YouTube ads only to discover that most of your traffic comes from Google search.

What needs to be done is to refine your search engine optimization in order to gain more organic traffic.

4 – Playback Locations

This feature lets you see your video views – views from YouTube and those that are coming from video embed. It is similar to backlinks that a post gets from other websites.

When you create high-quality videos, others may want to link to your videos, while others will prefer to embed the videos on their sites.

Through this, your videos get watched by many others who don’t need to visit YouTube before accessing your videos. From the embedded videos, they will be able to watch your videos and learn more about your brand.

So the Playback Locations helps you identify those websites that have your videos embedded.

5 – Subscribers

Subscribers are a very important feature that lets you know the total number of subscribers and those who have unsubscribed. You can view these details about subscribers within a set period of time.

You will also see the videos that attracted the highest number of subscribers to your channel. This will tell you which of the videos viewers love the most.

You can actually send URLs and other content to your subscribers directly.

Subscribers also let you view engagement metrics like the source of your subscribers (the country from where they come), and also the date that a particular person became one of your subscribers.

YouTube factors user engagement in arriving at your search ranking. That’s why you need to pay attention to every detail that is found in this feature.

Here is an article on How to Increase your YouTube Subscribers

6 – Playlists

YouTube Playlists was formerly known as Favorites, for those who may not be aware. What this feature shows to you is the number of your videos that are added to your viewers’ playlists.

Whenever a video is marked by someone, it is added to their playlist and automatically becomes part of their public YouTube profiles.

By doing so, your videos are better exposed to other members of YouTube.

7 – Comments

Several video comments show that the video is highly engaging, especially if it is a video with unique content, or maybe one that covers a controversial topic.

On YouTube Analytics, you view all details about comments that have been posted under your videos.

Most times, rather than making comments, people just prefer to “like” videos, probably because it is quicker to click a like button than write a comment.

You should be able to view comments on your YouTube Creator Studio sidebar.

8 – Sharing

Everyone looks forward to having their videos trend online, and eventually go viral.

Although there is no known method of finding out if a video will go viral, there are some qualities of viral videos.

One of those qualities is that viral videos are always original content or already existing content but with a new perspective or a new twist to it.

Also, viral videos are funny, interesting, highly informative, and entertaining. And when you are able to create videos with these qualities, you will attract a lot of viewers.

And better still, so many people will share your videos on their websites, social media profiles, and other online platforms.

The Sharing feature lets you see the total number of shares that your videos have received so far. You can also access details of the social media networks that the videos were shared on, and the dates they were shared.

These shares are also backlinks which offer the twin benefits of more exposure for your videos and boosting your videos search ranking.

9 – Likes and Dislikes

When it comes to video marketing on YouTube, every feedback is vital, because it lets you know what viewers think of your videos and what you need to do to improve your videos.

One of the ways that YouTube helps gather feedback is through the likes and dislikes of YouTube videos.

So viewers can like your videos if they find that your videos are of high quality. And also dislike your videos if the quality is poor, or if the content doesn’t offer value.

So you can keep track of all the responses to your videos, which are the likes and dislikes.

When a video has higher likes than dislikes, YouTube sees it as positive feedback. And if any of your viewers find your videos of good quality, YouTube reciprocates by improving your search ranking.

If you want to view the data on the likes and dislikes of your videos, click on the “+” sign in your advanced data. And after that, you should select interactions, and then likes (vs. Dislikes).

If you want to get more likes, shares, and comments, ask your viewers in your videos. Most of them will perform these actions if your Call-to-Action is compelling enough.

10 – Audience Retention

YouTube seeks to keep viewers on its platform for as long as possible. That’s why you see lots of related videos and topics when you’re watching any videos.

The longer you spend on YouTube, the more profitable you are to the video-sharing platform. And one of the ways YouTube encourages audience retention is the use of related videos.

Also, YouTube gives you details on audience retention to enable you to see how engaged your audience is. You will also find how much of your videos that your viewers watched before moving on.

The audience retention is sort of similar to the bounce rate, but the latter measures the percentage of time spent on your content.

11 – Device Type

The device type feature lets you see the different types of devices used to access your videos. The device types that can be found are discovered on mobile phones, tablets, TV, and game console.

So what benefits will you derive by knowing your viewers’ device types? When you know that a particular device type accounts for most of your viewers, you can better optimize your channel and videos.

If you find out that most of your viewers use mobile phones to access your channel, you can:

• Create shorter length videos for them in order to accommodate their device type
• Use aspect ratio that will fit in nicely with their screen sizes.

However, having more desktop views gives you more room to:

• Create video playlists since it will enable your viewers to watch back-to-back videos on your channel
• Create videos of whatever sizes that suit the video type since the size of the device isn’t a limiting factor.

12 – Cards

Cards are the final features on our list, and they act as Calls to Action. You can use cards to tell your viewers the next course of action to take.

Conclusion

It is important that you track and monitor the performance of your YouTube videos and channel. To enable you to do this with ease, you can use YouTube Analytics for free.

All you have to do is log in to your YouTube Studio and start using the tool. You will be able to see the total number of video views, discover the location of your audience, and find out your traffic sources.

Also, YouTube Analytics lets you track playback locations and discover viewers’ engagement with your videos.

There are many more details that can be obtained from YouTube Analytics.

The goal is to ensure you are able to measure everything that has to do with your YouTube videos so you can improve on them.

While video marketing has gone the extra mile in helping affiliate marketers promote brands and sell faster than ever, you may want to leverage Google the same way and make your affiliate marketing business more profitable.

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