YouTube Analytics for Marketers

Sometimes the most difficult part about your brand’s marketing efforts is measuring their effectiveness. Most online channels, though, provide marketers with data on the reach of the message and the demographics of the audience who received it. If you’re using YouTube to promote your brand, here are a few analytics features that can help you determine the effectiveness of your videos:

Overview

The overview section of YouTube Analytics gives you a snapshot of your videos’ performance. You can group videos together to compare them against other groups or videos, or you can get an overview of a single video. This is handy if you want to compare the engagement or demographics of two similar videos, or if you want to compare a set of videos from one campaign against another.

Views

Select a video you want to analyze, and Views will give you a detailed look into the number of views per day. You can also select Estimated Minutes Watched to see how long the video was watched for the period of time you selected (default is set to the last 28 days). Select Compare Metric to view a chart with both data. This information will correlate the number of views per day with the number minutes watched per day. If you scroll down, you’ll see which geographic location composed the most views.

Traffic Sources

If you’re wondering how viewers are finding your video, this information can be found under Traffic Sources. Common sources include external website, YouTube channel page, YouTube suggested video, and embedded player. If you click on any of these sources, you’re given more detailed information on the geography and date of the view. Additionally, when you click on External Website, you can see which websites pointed viewers to your video. You can use this information to make keyword changes to have your video be found more often in Google searches or to increase your social sharing.

Devices

Just as it sounds, this analytics report gives you the device type that the video was viewed on—a computer, mobile phone, tablet, etc. You can even find out which operating system was used (i.e. Windows, Macintosh, Android, etc). While this information might seem like more than you need, it is telling you about your viewers and their behaviors, which could influence some of your other marketing strategies. For instance, if it seems that most viewers are using mobile devices, you want to make sure that your videos are optimized for mobile—and ensure that additional marketing channels—blog, website, etc.—are mobile-friendly as well.

Audience Retention

This tool is probably one of the most useful for marketers in YouTube Analytics. According to YouTube, “Absolute Audience Retention shows the views of every moment of the video as a percentage of the number of video views.” What this means is that you can see exactly where in the video you are losing your viewers. This information can help you modify future videos to avoid this negative response from your audience and hopefully keep them watching for the full video.

While these are just a few of the analytics reports that YouTube provides, you can certainly learn a lot by viewing the statistics of your video. If you’ve uploaded YouTube videos for your brand, check out your video analytics to see if you’ve received a positive response.