Understanding YouTube Analytics – What Each Metric Is Telling You

You’ve decided to take advantage of the popular video sharing site YouTube in aid of your marketing efforts. Now, you just need to know if your efforts are actually working. Enter YouTube Analytics. Not only will it allow you to find out who’s watching your videos, but you can also figure out how to make your future videos more interesting and engaging.

Through Analytics, you can find out who your viewers are, what their preferences are, and how they’re reacting to your videos, and then, you can determine what kind of content you should further produce in order for your video marketing efforts to be successful.

Checking out the default setting of the Overview page of your Analytics, you get access to data gathered for the past 28 days, but you have the option to change it to any period from which you want to retrieve analytics.

You can view the reports for each metric and use the information in optimizing video performance. The following are the reports you can view in order to evaluate the success of your video efforts. They are basically sorted into two main classifications: the Views Reports and the Engagement Reports:

Views – It tells you such data as how many people watched your video and the estimated number of minutes it was watched.

• Demographics – This report gives insight into the gender and location of your audience. It tells you whether you’re reaching your target audience or not.
• Playback locations – This reports to you where your video has been embedded. It also shows estimated minutes watched as well as average view duration.
• Traffic sources – This tells you how people found your videos, if it was through YouTube search, playlist, suggested video, etc.
• Devices – This lets you know which devices and operating systems were used to view your videos.
• Audience retention – This tells you how much of your video is being watched.

Engagement – This shows you how your audience behaves toward your videos, what kind of engagement each one is generating.

• Subscribers – This report tells you how many people have subscribed and unsubscribed to your channel.
• Likes and dislikes – This tells you how your viewers are responding to your videos.
• Favorites – This shows you when your video is marked and unmarked as a favorite.
• Comments – This shows you how many comments each video has gotten.
• Sharing – This reports how many times your video has been shared and on which social sites.
• Annotations – This provides details on the activities on your video in relation to annotations you’ve added.

Video Marketing is one the most effective ways to promote your products and services throughout a variety of Internet channels today. Clearly, using Analytics and interpreting the information you’ve gotten from it allow you to measure your success on YouTube as well as to strategize on improving your videos’ performance. If you need help with your Video Marketing needs, feel free to contact our team at MGR Consulting Group and we’ll make sure that you get the most out of your online videos.

Thank you for reading. Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR)