All You Need to Know About YouTube Analytics to Improve Your Channel

Through analyzing YouTube Analytics and its metric, you soon know how to increase engagement, views, and subscribers for your YouTube video. Later, you can easily grow and scale your YouTube channel and the business.

BUT HOW TO USE THIS TOOL EFFECTIVELY?

Let’s get right into our latest post to find the answer!

Why YouTube Analytics?

As its name suggests, YouTube Analytics is a web analytics tool that allows you to access all the data your videos produce. By using it, you can explore more insight into your videos’ viewers and other metrics related to operating a successful channel.

How to access Analytics on YouTube?

• You need to login into your YouTube account first.
• Then click your profile icon and choose “YouTube Studio”.
• After that, choose Analytics from the left-hand menu and switch between the metrics such as Overview, Reach, Engagement, etc.
• And if you want a more thorough breakdown of video and channel analytics, simply click Advanced Mode.
• In case you prefer a comparison with year-over-year channel development, videos against videos, etc., you should choose Compare To in the upper right corner.

Tip: For those who want to download a report, remember to set parameters and then select the .cvs file or Google Sheets.

How to access YouTube Analytics on mobile?

• Firstly, open your YouTube app.
• Secondly, tap your profile icon and then “YouTube Studio”.
• Thirdly, open and sign in to the “YouTube Studio” app after downloading it.
• Fourthly, tap Analytics and then tap View More.
• Lastly, switch between all the metrics, including Overview, Revenue, Discovery, Audience, etc.

Now, we’re going to get into the key metrics you are waiting to grow your channel.

What are the Important Metrics to Track on YouTube Analytics?

Do you know that people upload 500 hours of video every minute on YouTube?

However, only a small fraction of those videos are successful.

That’s why we’ve put together the most powerful metrics so that you can follow to make impactful decisions and then improve your individual video and channel.

Watch Time

Watch Time is the total number of hours/minutes that your viewers have spent watching your videos during the given period. It’s vital since YouTube uses it to measure and predict the performance of your channel and video.

By analyzing this metric with Average View Duration, you can check how long viewers watch your content. From there, you easily rank each of your videos by watch time and then group them by lengths, themes, and styles to decide your most appealing types of videos.

Additionally, watch time is necessary for monetizing your videos. From now on, you need to attain 4,000 watch hours to join the YouTube Partner Program for getting monetized.

Audience Retention

Audience retention report shows how long your video holds a viewer’s attention as well as measuring viewer drop-off rates for your videos. For instance, if your average views are about 1-2 minutes while your video is five minutes long, your audience retention rate is about 30%.

While checking this metric, please not to miss two important graphs, including:

• Absolute audience retention determines the moments when your viewers stop watching and the most-watched moments in your videos. This graph also illustrates what does and does not attract your viewers, so you can use this data to improve your future videos.
• Relative audience retention compares your audience retention rate to other videos in the same length range. Although it doesn’t show any trend in your content, it points out your audiences’ behavior as compared to other channels’ audiences.

Note: YouTube evaluates videos with high audience retention in YouTube search rankings and suggestions since these videos can efficiently catch viewers’ attention.

Real Time Report

This metric in YouTube channel metrics helps you measure the video views after you announce it. You can see views between the last 60 minutes and the last 48 hours across your whole channel or for particular videos.

Although it’s not interesting to look at, it is able to discover spikes in traffic and then link them to real-time events.

For instance, assume that you post a new video on Facebook, yet get no spike in views. 10 minutes later, you post it on Twitter and the views spike greatly. Relying on that, you know that your Twitter audience is more approachable to that content than your Facebook ones.

Audience Demographics

No matter what you are creating a video or YouTube ads, you should know who you are targeting and who watches your video.

That’s why you need to check out the Demographics page to get a better understanding such as your audiences’ ages and genders, top cities and countries your audiences are watching, and so on.

Age and Gender

Knowing who your viewer is will help you make suitable and relevant content. For example, if your audiences are under 13, you cannot release R-rated content.

Location

Location is vital for e-commerce businesses.

For instance, if you have an engaged audience in a foreign country you’re currently not to expand or serve, why don’t you try dropshipping?

Or if you are advertising a local service or product, but your videos aren’t being watched locally, you should research your keywords.

Times and Days

Checking times and days viewers are on YouTube gives insights into when you should post new videos.

Traffic Sources

Using the traffic sources tool allows you to see whether your viewers are discovering your video via YouTube searches, suggested videos, external referrals like social media, channel pages, etc.

Head to the Reach Viewers tab to check your traffic sources and then estimate your reach.

For instance, if you invest money into a particular source of traffic that is not doing well, you should stop it and then redirect other resources. Or if your blog drives more traffic to YouTube, you should embed more videos in your blog.

Impressions Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This metric measures your video’s opportunity to urge people to watch your video after seeing it on their homepage, trending section, or suggested section.

A high impressions CTR means your title was appealing, and your video’s topic satisfies many audiences on YouTube. But what happens if your average view duration is low.

So, it means that your video caught viewers’ attention yet could not keep them staying longer. If this truly happens to one of your videos, you need to review your title and thumbnail because they might be misleading.

Meanwhile, a low CTR rate yet high engagement points out that your video has a small but particular audience that is interested in the content.

Card Click-Through Rate

Cards are customizable panels that prompt viewers to interact with more of your content during your video.

Head to the Cards Report in YouTube Analytics to find your card click-through rate, which will tell you which cards viewers are clicking on and the rate of interaction.

This metric also helps you put the most appealing card in each of your videos to increase your watch time, website traffic, and so on. Through analyzing card click-through rates, you discover the best timing, duration, and placement of your card in upcoming videos.

Likes and Dislikes

As one of the Engagement metrics, Likes and Dislikes delivers an easy and quick way to measure viewers’ feedback over time.

From there, you can understand your viewers’ opinions when it comes down to each of your videos. More importantly, you will know whether they enjoy your video itself or the video’s topic.

For instance, if you get a high dislike to like ratio, that means your viewer wouldn’t like something about your video. Ask yourself some questions, like:

• Do the title and thumbnail describe the video content?
• Is the content appropriate to my target audience?
• Does the video include any production quality?
• Is the audience disagreeing with the content of the video?

Or you can check comments to learn about potential issues and find a strategy to gain more views.

Subscriber Rate

Unlike average viewers, subscribers are your most loyal fan. Moreover, they are vital to your YouTube channel since YouTube will notify them about your new videos as well as featuring them on their homepage. This means they will watch your videos more frequently, which helps to create more views.

Fact: Subscribers also see twice as much video as non-subscribers. The more subscribers you get, the more watch time your videos have.

By entering the Subscribers Report, you can check the overall reach of your YouTube channel. This metric also allows you to understand how each video contributes to gaining or losing subscribers.

For example, if you see a particular video performs well, you should make the most of it. Or if a topic results in losing subscribers, you need to avoid it in upcoming videos.

Top Videos by End Screen

Many top videos end with images of other videos to attract the audience to keep watching. And the metric related to this shows you which end screens accounted for the most clicks.

Head to the Engagement, tap on See More to check the data in every detail. As a result, you easily discover videos that keep people watching.

How to Use Analytics to Improve Your YouTube Channel?

Aside from understanding each of the metrics, you need to learn how to use them to grow your YouTube views, channel, and revenue.

Below are some top ideas so that you can follow to use YouTube Analytics and its many dashboards properly.

• You can search for content ideas from suggested videos and keywords.
• Searching for collaboration ideas from suggested videos is a nice idea.
• Do not mind copying the format of the successful videos.
• Make sure to test new format ideas to check whether your audiences stick or not.
• Try to uncover the best time to publish and engage your audience (via live streams or scheduling premiers).
• Find the best and most profitable topics, niches, and income-generating topics.
• Remember to better your click-through rates of thumbnails.
• You should learn about your target audience because new content ideas are sometimes based on them.
• Do not forget to use real-time metrics to keep track of initial performance.

Any Alternative Tools?

The fact is, you can use other analytics tools to acquire more awareness into your campaigns on YouTube. Look at our suggestions below to better understand your video performance on YouTube.

Google Analytics

Since both Google and YouTube have in common with search and traffic, you can set up YouTube tracking in Google Analytics to get a clearer look at how people approach your channel.

Vidooly

This tool gives recommendations of how to improve your videos. Besides, it allows you to access video tag analysis so that you can uncover high-performing tags for your videos.

Ever so wonderfully, it helps to enhance your video’s SEO and rank your channel higher in YouTube keyword searches by providing a keyword tool. In case you start an influencer marketing campaign, it helps you explore which influencers might develop your channel.

Mentionlytics

This tool allows you to keep track of social conversations about your keywords, products, brands, or competitors. Also, it discovers how people are reacting to your video, identifies potential influencers or partners to team up with on future campaigns, etc.

UTM Parameters

UTM Parameters let you include links to your sites, particular products, or social network accounts. By attaching these shorts text codes to your URLs, you can easily monitor where traffic comes from. More importantly, you will get a complete picture of how YouTube marketing links to your social media goals.

What is Your Last Decision?

There is no denying the fact that YouTube Analytics is a powerful tool for understanding everything relating to your video performance, your audience, revenue, and so on.

Enter its dashboards and then you get all you want to grow your YouTube channel. The more time you analyze your channel and videos, the more ideas you receive to improve everything. And do not forget to combine it with other analytics tools (discussed above) to obtain more in-depth data about your target audience. Which metric on this list have you discovered most useful, Watch Time, Audience Retention, or Traffic Sources? Let us know by leaving your comments below!