Understanding YouTube Analytics

YouTube has become a one stop destination for all forms of videos, from education to recreation. This video sharing site has also become a great tool for marketing and advertisements. Recently, in an effort to reduce hate speech and vulgar content, YouTube has upgraded its terms and conditions and improved its analytics for the users. The amount of insights any user can gather from YouTube analytics coupled with YouTube’s new usage rules and regulations can help increase the performance of videos and optimize their business as a whole.

YouTube Analytics can help users craft the perfect marketing message. Multiple metrics can be taken into consideration to market a message or product to the target audience. Beyond subscriber count and number of views, YouTube also provides insights in the demographic of the people watching the video, the devices they use and how people find these videos. By breaking down when, where and how long people view a video, users can create target specific strategies to increase views and subscriber count thereby building an audience that cares about the brand and the message.

1. Watch Time
Apart from the number of views each video receives, users also must take a look at who is watching the content and their level of engagement and conversion. One metric that should be monitored religiously is the watch time of the video. The watch time indicates the total time users spend watching the videos, in minutes, over a specific period of time. It is important to understand how engaged people are and how long they’re watching a video. The average view duration and percentage of video viewed are the two most valuable metrics to get more organic viewership to the channel and videos.

2. Demographics
The demographic breaks down the audience of a channel into groups based on age, gender, geographic location and more. Since the ultimate aim of all YouTube content generators is to get the maximum number of views to each video, demographics provides the perfect base to build the channel by concentrating on the type of audience who watch the content.

3. Traffic Sources
YouTube also provides information on how people are finding videos and from where the viewers are watching them. Traffic sources enable the users to understand which promotional strategies are working and which ones are not. Types of traffic sources include YouTube search, YouTube suggested videos, YouTube channel page and YouTube playlist.

4. Audience Retention
Audience retention refers to how much of a video is being watched on an average. The audience retention rate is the easiest way to maintain the watch time of the channel, create content the target audience is looking for and deliver it quickly and effectively. If viewers watch the videos for a longer period of time, the channel will generally rank higher in the YouTube search and suggested videos.

5. Engagement
This metric provides information such as the number of Likes, Dislikes and Favorites a video gets and the comments the viewers are posting. Engagement provides an insight to how well the viewers connect with the brand and content and see how people are responding to the videos, both positively and negatively. Engagement also includes the number of times viewers have continued to watch the end screen videos and clicked on the information cards. 

YouTube is not just a channel to advertise and market products but a platform to create a community of loyal followers. YouTube Analytics can be leveraged to not only get more views on YouTube, but to turn those views into subscribers, leads, and sales.