Online Marketing | Web Analytics

Getting Started with YouTube Analytics

I really do not need to start this blog post off with a description of YouTube. Everyone knows what YouTube is and how it functions. From cat videos to branded content to teen-vlogging, everyone has some exposure to the world’s most famous video platform.

I am sure anyone reading this blog post is also aware of the massive potential that this presents brands (if you are not, or want to know more – here’s a blog post on that). The question that this blog post is going to tackle is how best to measure the success of our YouTube content.

There are two key elements that I am going to cover in this blog post: What data to look at and what to do with this data?

What data to look at:

YouTube provides their own analytics platform which separates data into a number of different reports. Rather than look at each of these though, we are going to highlight three key areas:

Paid vs Organic

YouTube is still classified in many regards as being a Social Media platform and just like all other Social Media platforms, it is important to differentiate between organic and paid performance.

This is not immediately clear when viewing your YouTube analytics. In order to see whether that increase in video views is due to your ad campaign, you will need to look at your traffic sources report.

Watch time

Traditionally YouTube video traffic was measured in views, with the addition of pre-roll videos, auto-play and people’s affinity for skipping forward, the views metric has however diminished in importance.

Luckily, this has been replaced with the far more robust watch time metric. This measures the amount of time people spent watching videos and allows for good comparisons from one time-frame to another.

Likes and Dislikes

One of the most underutilized metrics in the YouTube analytics suite is the Likes and Dislikes metric. This is a great indicator of the sentiment around your video, as well as how engaged viewers are with your videos.

This is one of the few opportunities where you are able to receive feedback on your marketing efforts without actively asking for it. It really is the one metric that is too good to pass up. It is also a great metric to measure the effectiveness of your YouTube content.

For a more detailed look at all of the various YouTube Analytics reports, take a look at this blog post.

What to do with the data:

YouTube has evolved consistently over the past few years, unfortunately the YouTube analytics interface has been somewhat forgotten. The interface is hard to find, hard to navigate, requires you to be logged into a specific account and even when you get to the right page, metrics are not always intuitively laid out.

Luckily there is a fantastic solution for this clumsy interface – Dashboards. With the launch of Google Data Studio and the rise of fantastic Dashboarding tools such as Klipfolio, it is easier than ever to pull YouTube Analytics metrics straight into a dashboard. Here these metrics can be compared to your website metrics or metrics from other social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter.

YouTube Analytics often slips through the cracks in the world of digital analytics, by adding the key metrics to your marketing dashboard, you ensure that this incredibly powerful channel gets the attention it deserves.

If you have any more questions about YouTube Analytics, please send me an email.

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