YouTube marketing has become a task on the top of many priority lists for companies this past year. Videos are easier to digest for consumers and can be much more interactive, so it’s no surprise that YouTube is becoming more popular for educational and informative videos. In other words, if funny and witty videos work for your business you might have more luck, but just about any company can make a video work for a website.
So logically if you put a video on a website, the natural next step is to put that video onto a company YouTube page. But what about tracking your YouTube marketing success? What metrics should you be tracking to improve your YouTube marketing? And what tools are best? Fortunately, it’s pretty simple if you know what to watch.
A Quick Overview of YouTube Metrics
YouTube still doesn’t have the greatest analytics data options, but they do have a few that you should take advantage of when trying to analyze your YouTube efforts. Your first step, however, is to visit your analytics page on YouTube in the first place. Below is a screenshot of a test:
As you can see, this is an overview page that offers quick data regarding how your page was found by visitors, demographics, your top 10 videos, engagement, and performance including views and estimated time someone watches your videos.
The features that can be significant to marketers that are in the top right hand corner include:
- Groups: Allows you to batch videos together into groups so you can have grouped data. This works well if you create a series or are testing.
- Download Report: Downloads the data into a .csv file for Excel use.
- Comparison
Of course, there are quite a few other features on the left hand side that are important to watch. This deeper data is divided into Views and Engagement.
Top Metrics to Always be Watching for YouTube Marketing Success
Below explains the most important metrics to use for YouTube marketing success and why and how you can use them to your advantage.
Views
All of the following metrics are found under the Views section of analytics:
Minutes Watched
This metric will give you an aggregated number that refers to the total time that the video has been played. This is not only great so you can see which videos are getting the most watch time and therefore succeeding, but it can help you to use this number in relation to conversions. In the screenshot below, you’ll see that the timeframe has been adjusted (here it was merely because this was a test, but this could be helpful for your own comparisons). You also have the option to compare metrics, see them in a pie chart, and more:
Playback Locations
When you click Playback Location, you get metrics that tell you where your video was viewed. Typically, this will be either through YouTube versus when you or someone else embedded the video onto another webpage. This is always interesting because it helps make sure that your videos are being viewed where you intended, but better yet you might find surprising results that will actually change your strategy.
For fun, the screenshot below shows the data suing the color-coding display option (which you can see is chosen just the left of the graph, which is the same as how the line graph in the last screenshot was chosen):
Sharing
This hasn’t always been a “top metric, but with the latest Google changes and the way the search space is changing sharing it has become crucial. This feature will show you the number of shares based on each of the major social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Subscribers
Who subscribes to your company YouTube page is key because this will help you increase page views, time watched, and other metrics. You will get data on how many subscribers you’ve gained as well as how many you’ve lost if you use the compare metric function, and YouTube can even identify which videos are helping you gain these subscribers. Knowing this information can help you ensure that you’re only producing the videos that will help you earn subscribers.
For more information, visit the YouTube Analytics Support page that explains how everything works and why.
What metrics do you find are crucial to watch each week when it comes to YouTube? Do you have any more tips for YouTube marketing success?
Republished by permission. Original here.
YouTube Photo via Shutterstock
It’s about time that Youtube has some metrics too. This is a good idea Google! Video marketing should be measure for more than just traffic.