Youtube collects lots of useful data about your Youtube channel. By studying the analytic of your channel, you can improve on it and help grow your channel.
By just looking at Youtube Analytic, many of the information in analytics looks like another language. It looks very confusing and you start getting headaches. But if you know what you are looking for, it isn’t so bad. So in this post, we will break down each information so you know what to look for and how to use the information to make your channel grow.
How to get to Youtube Analytics
Youtube Analytics can be found in your CREATOR STUDIO. Just go to MY CHANNEL and click on VIDEO MANAGER.
Under CREATOR STUDIO, you’ll see ANALYTICS.
On Overview page, two most important things you should look for are Watch Time and Average View Duration. This tells you how well your channel is going. Watch time and View duration are more important than number of views because Youtube decide how well your video is going by looking at how long people are watching your video. When Youtube see many people are watching the video all the way through, your Youtube videos are ranked high in the search engine and appears on Suggested Video sections.
If you scroll over to Watch time and Average view duration, it tells you how well your channel is going compare to previous period. Your goal is to continue to increase the watch time and view duration.
Watch time and Average Duration
If you click on Watch time and Average Duration, you can get detail information of each section. If you click on detail information for Average Duration, there is option for view multi-line chart graphic on the left side. On the multi-line chart graph, it will show you top 5 videos with highest watch time. So you can see which videos are going well. If you have some videos that are doing well, trying to see what so different about these videos from the rest of the videod and try to create more of those type of videos.
Your goal is to make these videos better so it has the highest retention rate as possible. If you see a video that has a low retention, you can analyze the video to see where people are dropping out. If you click on each video from this section, it will break down each video by second and tell you where people are starting to drop off. You are looking for big drop off and see what is causing it, and trying to see if you can fix it. If you click on the point where people are dropping off, you can actually see the video below where they are dropping off.
Below is the example graph. In this example, there is a big drop in very beginning. This is pretty normal for almost all the videos. People just have very short attention span. But if you have intro, see if people are leaving during the intro. If many viewers are dropping off during the intro, your intro might be too long or very boring.
Besides that the graph is pretty consistent which is a good news. But at the end, there is big drop off which is the End Screen section of the video. This is also very normal. Most people drop off during the End Screen. One thing I could do is make the End Screen even shorter, or put a surprise clips at the end of the video so the viewers can watch all the way through to see the surprise clip.
Also, if you see a big dip on your retention graph, it means the audience has skipped and fast forwarded your video. It is very help to find out why the viewers have skipped the section of your video. Most likely there is video glitch such as bad audio or video. Or it can be simple as video being just boring and dragging.
Relative audience retension
Pay attention to Relative audience retention. In this option, Youtube compares your video to rest of the video in Youtube to see how it is doing. If your video stays above the average level it is doing well. If your video drops quickly to below average, you can try to analyze the video to see what is causing it. Relative audience retention give you little better picture of how your video is doing.
Just understand that some times, you just can’t do much about people’s retention. Your goal is to find some kind patterns in your video that cause more people to drop out, so you can try to make it better.
Video Comparison
Comparison is also very useful tool. You can choose any two videos and compare side by side so you look for different trends. If is very useful when you create a new video by improving on your old video. Use Comparison option to compare these two videos to see if your new video is actually doing better or not.
To get the most out of the comparison tool, choose the two similar videos much as you can. Comparison button can be found on top of the page.
Demographic
Demographics information is very useful data. It tells you about your audience. It breaks down into different age groups, gender, and where are they from. With these information, you can analyze each of your videos and see who are majority of the audience so that you can adjust your video even more towards your audience.
Traffic Sources
Traffic Source is very useful data. It tells where the traffic is coming rom. In below example, majority of the traffic is coming from Suggest Videos. Once your video gets into Suggest Video, you hit the jackpot. You’ll suddenly gets lots of hits. Unfortunately, you have not control over this. YouTube choose these types of video according to video retention rate.
In below example, YouTube search is second major traffic. This is very good thing. This means that many of the videos are hitting the first page in YouTube search. In order to see which keyword is doing well, click on the YouTube search link. It will show you all the keywords that is ranking well for your video.
Also pay attention to End Screens. This tells you if your end screen call-to-action is doing well or not. In this example, it is getting some traffic but not too many. But since it is getting some traffic, end screen does help getting more views for your videos.
End Screen
Speaking of End Screen, End Screen has it’s own section where it tells you how well your call-to-action End Screens are doing. End screen is important because this is where the audience can subscribes and continue to watch other videos in your channel. If you don’t have End screen, you better make one on every video because it does help. If you have End screen, you can look at the data to see if your End Screen is helping or not. By looking at the data, you can optimize the End Screen by adjusting how long your End Screen should be and what other videos you can embedded so that the viewers can continue to stay in your channels and watch other videos.
Subscribers
Last section is Subscribers section. Subscriber section tells you where the subscribers are coming from and how many subscribers you are gaining or loosing. But if you look at the data closely, you’ll quickly realized that almost all the subscribers comes from watching your video. So naturally, more views you have on your video, more subscribers you are going to get.
Conclusion
If you are new to Youtube Analytic, this maybe overwhelming to you. But after spending some time to explore these data, you’ll get used to it, and it won’t be too bad.
Obviously there are lot more data in Youtube Analytics that we didn’t go over. But what we featured on this post are some of the important data you should be aware of. These data can help make your video better and help grow your channel.
So good luck!