Last week we gave a brief overview of the major update to YouTube that included a revamped interface and a new YouTube Analytics tool that replaces Insights.
Because the update to YouTube Analytics is so significant, we wanted to break down all the new features and explain how you can use them to improve your video marketing strategy.
When you first visit youtube.com/analytics, you’ll be presented with a summary report where you can see high-level data for the video content on your Channel.
A column on the lefthand side will give you access to deeper data sets. The column is broken into two parts: Views reports and Engagement reports. In this post, we’re going to focus on Views reports.
Views reports are broken up into several segments: Views, Demographics, Playback Locations, Traffic Sources and Audience Retention. Clicking one segment will give you an overview summary of that segment, simliar to the summary on the Analytics homepage.
Once you’ve selected a segment, click in the “search for content” box to see a drop-down of all of your videos. You can see individual data sets for each video here.
Demographics
The Demographics metric lets you know who is watching your video. Knowing who your audience is is very important when thinking about future video productions.
You can adjust data by gender, age and geographic location.
Practical Use: If you knew your primary audience was in the 25-34 age demographic, what can you do in future videos to appeal to those viewers? Comparing two or more videos: what content is drawing the attention of that demographic versus another?
Playback Locations and Traffic Sources
Formerly known as “Discovery” in Insights, both of these metrics essentially define how viewers are finding and viewing your video.
Playback Locations reveals the page, site, or device the video was viewed on. If you’re embedding your video on your website or blogpost, use Playback Locations to discover how many views that embed is drawing vs. views on YouTube.com. You can also see how many mobile device views you’re getting.
Practical Use: Are your embedded videos underperforming? Maybe you can adjust their location on webpages or blog posts. Is someone embedding your video without your knowledge?
In Traffic Sources, you can discover how viewers find your video on YouTube.com itself, whether through the search bar, suggested videos or links from outside websites or social network.
Practical Use: Are more people finding your video through search or by direct link? Does twitter create a lot of views for you? How can you adjust your video titles, descriptions or keywords to draw more search traffic?
Audience Retention
Formerly known as “Hot Spots” in Insights, Audience Retention metrics are extremely useful in measuring the value of your content.
Audience Retention is broken into two additional segments: Absolute audience retention shows the views of every moment of the video as a percentage of the number of views of the beginning of the video, while Relative audience retention shows your video’s ability to retain viewers during playback relative to all YouTube videos of similar length.
By interpreting the graphs on this metric, you can see at what points of your video do people stop or start watching. If you see a peak in the middle of the graph, you could infer that viewers are skipping right to that section of the video. Likewise, if you see a dramatic drop-off in viewership, you may consider not including the element that appears at that time in your next video. Finally, If you see a gradual decline in viewership across the video, you could infer that the video goes on for too long and viewers got bored.
Practical Use: Is there an on-camera personality that draws more attention than others? Should you consider producing shorter or longer videos in the future? Are viewers rewinding and re-watching a particular moment? If so, why?
By interpreting the many robust metrics that YouTube Analytics offers, you can beging thinking about your content from the eyes of the your viewers rather than as the producer. If you’re producing videos regularly (and you should be), frequent or even daily monitoring of analytics is crucial to creating the most engaging content possible.
Next week we’ll cover the Engagement reports segment, which measure activity on YouTube.com from other users interacting with your video content.
For further information, check out the excellent Help Article that Google has posted on all the tools offered in YouTube Analytics.
About Steven Shattuck
When I watch stuff over at youtube, I just do it for fun. I never thought there would be so much analytics behind it. The depth at which the analysis takes place is mind boggling for me! I have suddenly developed much more respect for videos on youtube!
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