YouTube is by far the largest video hosting platform and you probably are on there if you’re doing any video for your brand. But how are you doing on there? And do you know what to look for? Here are some tips our team can offer to help you assess the situation correctly.
Powerful Analytics
YouTube offers amazing analytics you can access right on your channel’s backend. Simply go to “Creator Studio” and select “Analytics” in the left navigation. This is both free and a quite powerful tool analyzing multiple aspects of the video performance experience.
As you will see upon navigating you can view any of the following criteria: watch time, demographics, location, audience retention, and even devices used to play the videos. Oh and more! Pretty cool.
Watch Time Versus Views
The first bit of data to understand is “watch time”. This is the length of time a person watches a video. It could be as short as a second or as long as your video actually is.
“Views” are not the same thing. Views are simply the number of times a video was viewed at all. Every time the video loads in front of someone counts towards this.
Watch time shows engagement while views merely shows a video loaded. Our suggestion is you look more carefully at the watch time. Views are public and may look impressive but they don’t equate to an engaged audience or subscribers.
Audience Retention
This data shows when your audience drops off or stops watching your video content. You can see averages here. And if you click on ‘Relative Audience Retention’ you can see how it’s performing compared to other similar content on the web.
Demographics
Demographics will tell you whether you are reaching the ‘right’ people or better said, the targeted people. If you are selling toys for instance, you probably want to reach moms and dads who have the wallet.
But who knows? Your strategy may even shift if you are hitting a certain demographic you were not intending. It could even be a game changer.
Devices
Knowing if most of your views are coming from mobile or desktop can be super helpful. This may mean target mobile with vertical ads and ads with titles. Or a balance between them may tell you to keep creating for both
Traffic Sources
YouTube gives a pretty powerful analytic in “traffic sources” reports. Get perspective on how viewers got to your videos in the first place. Double down on efforts paying off.
Data Can Help!
Knowing things like these analytics can really help you understand how to improve and where to spend resource and energy. You can also know what to cut back or drill down on.