With over 2 Billion users on the YouTube platform per day, it’s no wonder that it is the second-largest search engine in the world after Google. It also constitutes an essential part of marketing and promotional campaigns. Starting a YouTube channel is relatively easier, all you need is a good space for shooting videos, content ideas, a camera, a laptop, and a microphone for YouTube. The true test stands in being consistent and growing steadily. YouTube offers a feature called YouTube Analytics for monitoring your performance in terms of growth. It has a wide range of criteria and metrics for growth tracking.
Among so many, it is difficult to know which metrics to consider more important than others. To help you with that, here’s a guide to 10 important metrics which you need to consider for better video performance:
Here are The Youtube Analytics Metrics
Watch Time
YouTubers tend to focus only on the number of views they get. A larger number of views does not essentially mean a great video. The YouTube watch time report comes extremely handy in this sense. It shows graphs for the number of times people are watching your video. You can use this analysis to highlight areas where your viewers lose their attention and interest. Furthermore, you can use this data for your next videos to make content that will be of better quality and will hold the attention of the audience.
Comments
Comments tell a lot about your audience’s opinion. It could bring attention to your shortcomings and specific areas appreciated by the audience. Also, the time span of when comments are posted is displayed by YouTube analytics. Be a brand that is an engaging and approachable one. The people who comment can be converted to potential customers if you are a business selling products. You could respond to comments with information, gratitude, or directing them to other content that you have created. Either way, comments are a great way to receive qualitative feedback.
Likes and Dislikes
The YT analytics tab shows a section of the likes and dislikes your video receives over time. It is obvious that every video will receive a few dislikes but the ratio of likes and dislikes for a video talks a lot. If you are getting too many dislikes then it is time to analyze your content and improve it. Also, it will help you identify what the audience is liking more by analyzing your most liked videos. Analyzing this metric along with comments can be quite insightful to improve your video performance.
Subscribers
The most obvious and paid attention to the metric is the subscriber count. Instead of showing statistics for a single video it shows the overall reach of your channel and how each video affects the subscriber rate. It is also a good indicator for potential customers for a business in the form of subscribers. A larger number of subscribers assure you the interest of the audience and definitive reach. It is important to track your subscriber rate from time to time from improving reach, growth, and performance.
Social Shares
Social share analytics by YouTube show how many times and where your video has been shared. This is an important metric to identify videos that your audience finds interesting and making a strategy for reaching a wider base of audience. Social Media is a powerful tool in this context. By analyzing this metric, it will help you understand the functionality of your video. You can adjust the time periods to analyze in what specific periods after publishing your video are getting shared on what specific media platform.
Audience Retention
This is an extremely useful metric. It will help you identify parts where your audience stops watching the video or where they fast-forward it. You can also use the relative audience retention metric to compare with videos of the same length and find out where your audience retention rate stands. It will help to avoid making similar content or presentation mistakes for future videos. This metric shows statistics for a single video at a time hence, it is ideal to study a few videos from your channel and get insightful data regarding negative points and possible improvements for your next video.
Audience Demographics
Understanding your audience is the key to making engaging content. The Audience demographics metric does just that. It shows the age group and gender of the audience watching your video. It also shows the location of your viewers. This will help you to make more engaging content suitable to the interest of your audience age-group and make location-specific or age-specific content too. The YT analytics tab shows a gender and age graph for specific country locations that can come quite handy over a period of time
Keywords
Keywords can magnify your reach by leaps and bounds. YouTube has its own Youtube analytics in the discovery tab that shows what keywords people searched to reach your video. This is an important report to understand if your keywords are exact and meet the search queries of viewers. You can modify the keywords in your title and description accordingly in the future.
Sources of traffic
Another important metric that should be studied is the sources of traffic generation for your video. It shows from what sources the audience is getting to know about your video. It could be through YouTube discovery, auto-suggestion, searches, or other media sites like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. This will help you identify your most beneficial sources and optimize your videos further for these sources. It will also help you to diversify your reach across social media.
Re-watch
How will you come to know if your viewers are re-watching specific parts of a video? The absolute audience retention report will show higher peak points and curves for specific parts of a video that are being re-watched. It will help you identify key areas of interest that could be gold mines for your next video. This will also show the least interesting areas so that you can work on them to make them more interesting.
These are the 10 important metrics and reports that can offer a lot of insight and data about improving your video content and performance, enabling a wider overall reach for your channel. Studying these over a period of time will surely help your channel grow along with successful marketing. Having knowledge, data, and research before making a new video is like getting half work well done.
