YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world after Google. And if the video is a part of your marketing strategy, then you’ve most likely already invested time, effort, and creativity into videos for your YouTube channel.
In other posts, we have offered a comprehensive guide to beginning a YouTube channel for your enterprise and the reason why e-commerce product videos will improve sales.
However, in order to take advantage of YouTube as a platform to engage your clients, you may also mine YouTube Analytics (click here to visit your dashboard) for a treasure trove of insights to enhance the performance of your videos.
Listed below are 10 metrics worth tracking and the way to analyze them to achieve long-term success with your YouTube channel.
1. Understand Watch Time
There’s no denying that Views are an essential metric for determining the success of a YouTube video.
However while they’re one indicator of performance, Views alone won’t provide you with enough info to make vital improvements to your YouTube videos, nor does YouTube put lots of stock in them given the prevalence of clickbait tactics that usually inflate View count.
Instead, views need to be analyzed alongside a more important metric that’s key to getting on the great side of YouTube’s algorithm: Watch Time.
From Youtube’s perspective, Watch Time, or the estimated total minutes spent viewing your content material, is more necessary than a raw view. The updated Analytics dashboard makes this clear by dedicating an entire section to this new, more telling metric of video efficiency.
Both Watch Time and Views, however, are really only helpful indicators when analyzed alongside other data that may assist you to enhance the discoverability and quality of your content material, as we’ll discover further down in this post.
2. Keep an Eye on Your Real-Time Report
YouTube confirmation View count to delete spammy and low-quality views from the total. There’s usually a 2-day lag in the number of views that YouTube displays both publicly and in your dashboard.
That’s why the Real-Time report for your channel is important for measuring the reach of your videos early on. This report offers you the estimated number of views from the final 48 hours and the last 60 minutes, across your channel or for particular videos.
YouTube’s Real Time report isn’t just exciting to watch each time you add a new video or promote it via one of your owned or paid channels. Keeping an eye on this tab in the Analytics dashboard may also help you uncover spikes in views that suggest somebody has shared your video with new viewers, say, on Reddit or another social network.
These moments present good chances to stoke the fire and garner more traction for your video by engaging with the poster, thread, or publication before things go cold.
When you discover a spike in your real-time report, you could use the following Google search question to try to identify where your videos have been shared outside of YouTube and discover a chance to engage:
YOUTUBE-ID -site:youtube.com (e.g. ImRJ76klNTc -site:youtube.com)
3. Identify Your Traffic Sources
When analyzing your video’s reach, it’s necessary to figure out precisely where your viewers are coming from.
In your YouTube Analytics panel, on the Traffic Sources page, you’re presented with another graph showing various sources of traffic, along with the total amount per source. This reveals how your viewers are discovering your videos.
This is what it looks like:
This report permits you to determine which source of traffic is most useful to you across your entire channel and for each individual video you create. Don’t just look at the number of views they’re generating—not all sources will provide you with the same quality of traffic.
For example, in case your video is attracting high-quality views through YouTube search, you may start to implement methods to further optimize your video or future content to show up for the keywords people may use to find your content.
Use this view to determine which traffic sources are important to your video promotion strategy, and which sources should be worked on.
4. Determine Your Audience Demographics
To get a better understanding of your viewers, head over to the Demographics page of your YouTube analytics.
These interactive graphs permit you to visualize who’s consuming your videos, utilizing dimensions like age, gender, geography, device, and more.
E-commerce product videos will nearly certainly reach a portion of customers who were unreachable to you through conventional search engines. Reviewing the age and gender of your video viewers could offer new info to build your future product videos upon.
In the ‘Demographics’ page, you may also uncover where in the world your viewers are watching. Just go to the “More” tab and search for “Geography”.
Many industries aren’t particularly bothered by the geographical variations in their video viewers. A viewer is a viewer. However, as an e-commerce business, the location of your potential clients might be of great interest to you when you plan to reach them with targeted adverts or content material.
To delve further into the geographic statistics, you may choose each individual country, displaying a new age and gender graph for that specific country. Utilizing this info, you may create location-specific videos in the future when you discover any geographic trends.
5. Pay Attention To Playback Locations
Determining where your videos are being viewed can help you understand how your viewers are discovering your content material. Are they searching and discovering it via YouTube itself or via external websites?
The Playback Locations page displays your total views based on where the video was played. Your views will be divided into YouTube Channel page, YouTube Watch Page, Embedded Video and Mobile Devices.
By reviewing which location is serving you greatest, you may determine both your video’s reputation on and off YouTube. This will provide you with an indication as to whether you should spend more time on YouTube optimization, or whether the real opportunities are getting your videos embedded on external websites and blogs.