YouTube Analytics – A Video Marketing Essential

Video marketing can be exciting and rewarding, but it can also be a challenge and sometimes tutorials can’t tell you everything. They give you the basics and tips for making an effective video and ranking it, but the problem is that after that you’re on your own.

You can follow everything you’ve learned to a T and still find you’re not having the success you expected.

What’s missing is an understanding of what’s really  happening with your audience.

Going Behind the Scenes with YouTube Analytics

One of the best ways to be successful in video marketing, besides knowing as much as possible about the process, is to understand your audience.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could survey everyone who watched your video for feedback about themselves and how they feel about your content? What they liked and didn’t like? Whether it prompted them to watch another video or click a link or buy a product?

That information would give you a very good idea of where to focus your efforts for your next videos.

Evaluating the stats of your videos analytic data does the same thing. You can get all the information your viewers would give you in a survey in the form of charts, graphs and lists.

You’ve got all the information you need on your own YouTube account and it’s FREE. Here’s how to use it.

Using YouTube Analytics

When you’re signed into your YouTube account, click on the arrow next to the “upload” option and select “Analytics” from the drop-down menu.

Once there, start sorting by date, you can select the date range of your preference.

Then you can go down to your “Top 10 videos”. Here you’ll see the ranking of your videos in the context of views and likes.

To demonstrate some of the features of YouTube Analytics, go ahead and select one of your videos. You can click on any of the features of the overview to see the details, but let’s take a look at the vertical menu on the left.

1) Views

Here you have views per country. If you click on USA you’ll see how many times it was watched in each state.

2) Demographics

Here you’ll see how many boys and girls watched your video and what ages. If your video is meant to target young adults and you see that more 55 to 64 year-olds are watching it, you know you’ve got a problem to fix.

3) Playback locations

This is a killer feature for the serious video marketer. Here you can find out what site/page the video was viewed on.

Now click on “Embedded player on other websites” to find out who embedded your video on their site. What would you think about contacting them to propose guest posting or advertising or even creating a video for their audience?

4) Traffic Sources

How did your viewers find your video? Here you’ll see what search engine they used and what keyword phrases brought the most traffic.

5) Audience retention

This is one of the best features to help improve your video marketing. It shows you what parts of the video people came to for repeat viewing and where they skipped ahead or simply abandoned your video.

This is great information for knowing what to change or how to improve your style to maximize the attractiveness and efficiency of your videos.

There are more cool features too. YouTube Analytics is a great tool for helping you make your video marketing more successful.

Please share your opinion or experience using YouTube analytics by leaving a comment below.

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