Most people rely on their intuition when deciding which videos to upload, who to target, and how to grow their YouTube channels. Unfortunately, this is the wrong approach, as building a successful channel depends on how well you understand your audience. This is where YouTube analytics come in handy. Generally, it is a tool that boasts a ton of metrics that help you understand your audience to the core so that you can create more engaging and valuable content and track your progress.
YouTube can become a goldmine if you learn how to use YouTube Analytics. You'll understand why some videos have more views than others, why some audiences stay on some of your videos only for a few seconds, and why they share some videos and leave the others. Keep reading if you want to understand how to leverage YouTube analytics to grow your channel.
10 Important YouTube Metrics and Some Insightful Tips and Tricks to Get the Best Out of Your Channel
To help you understand how metrics are linked on YouTube, we take a look at the viewer consumption cycle, which features three stages:
- Attraction
- Consumption
- Reaction
Attraction
This is a stage that details how well your videos attract and pull viewers. It includes:
- Traffic Sources
The first thing for any smart person is to understand is where your viewers are coming from. Although there a vast array of sources, these three have proven to drive the most traffic to YouTube Videos than the rest.
- Searching. If more people find your video when they type something on the YouTube search bar, it’s likely to get more views.
- Recommendations. Viewers can also learn about your video when it’s tagged alongside other videos you’re watching.
- Browsing. People can also come across your videos on YouTube's homepage.
Enhancing Your Videos through Traffic sources
One of the most excellent ways to get your videos to appear at the top page of the YouTube search engine, the homepage, or in the recommended views section is through content optimization. And although this is a broad topic that involves several aspects, here are a few essential tips that work for may Youtuber and YouTube Marketers:
- Use bold, value-focused titles
- Put keywords in the video description
- Let keywords be visible when your front-loading titles
- Impressions click-through rate
This is how often someone runs to watch your video after stumbling on an impression on YouTube. To understand if your videos are benefiting from the impression click-through rate, you should consider other metrics such as average view duration, traffic sources, and demographics.
Improving your Videos with the impression click-through rate
If your channel is raking tons of traffic and impressions and the average view duration is low, it appears as if people feel baited by your thumbnails and titles. If you want to fix this, you need to use valuable, engaging, and factual titles and thumbnails.
- Average Views Per Viewer
This metric indicates how many times a viewer returns to watch your videos on average. If you find that a particular video has many return viewers, it means that it features the kind of content or topics that many of your audiences like.
- Demographics
With this metric, you can clearly understand more about the people watching your videos, including their geographical location, age, and gender.
Improve your Videos by Factoring the Demography
With the demographic information, you can understand who are your greatest supporters and the content they are interested in. You can go ahead to define your core audience and create content that resonates with their needs. Remember, creating generic content can derail your audience growth.
Consumption
This stage involves knowing how your content is consumed, and the tactics and tips you can use to improve these metrics. They include:
- Average Percentage Viewed
This metric measures to what extent a viewer has watched a video on average. It helps you evaluate how well your videos grab the viewer's attention
- Average View Duration
This is the total watch-time duration divided by the number of views by a user. The average duration can be computed on a per-video basis or used as a measure of the time that people spend watching videos on your channel.
- Audience Retention
Audience retention tracks the viewers' engagement over time. It shows you when viewers watch and leave your videos. Here, you get to see a list of your best performing videos, average view duration stats, and how your videos compare with others on YouTube.
- Watch Time from Your Subscribers
Here, you get to know how much time the viewers who have subscribed to your channel spend on your videos. If your videos are being watched for a longer time by your subscribers, it means that you are delivering the value. However, the vice versa is also correct.
Improving Consumption Metrics
Although it might seem like an uphill task, grabbing the viewer's attention can be relatively easy. The first you should prioritize is to ensure that your videos tell a story that's entertaining and educative. Like any other formal story, make sure it has an introduction, body, and conclusion.
You also need to kill monotony by inserting pattern interrupts. These are information piecemeals that help make users stay attentive. However, make sure you don't deviate from the original idea or the theme of the story.
Reaction
In this stage, we consider things that new viewers come into contact with first when they click on your video. They are expressions that show how users react to your videos. They include:
- Interactions
The number of subscribers, comments, shares, and likes & dislikes can tell how people feel about your videos. You can use these metrics to understand what your audience thinks and make some improvements.
- YouTube Recommendations
If you want your videos to appear in the recommended list on YouTube, you need to focus your attention on making the viewers happy. This is because YouTube algorithms use a combination of all viewer-centric metrics to create user profiles that show what people want to watch.
Enhancing the Reaction Metrics
If you want to boost your reaction metrics, the bottom line is to focus your undivided attention on delivering content that users will love. For starters, your content needs to be depth and information-rich. Viewers don’t like shallow videos that only scratches the surface. Be authentic by creating videos that don’t just follow the trend but also display some uniqueness of the concept and show some sophistication.
Lastly, make the data your friend. Don’t post videos just for the sake, seek to understand how the data provided on your YouTube channel can help you create more engaging videos. Make sure you know how to pull together the tons of insights and analytics offered by YouTube to gauge your performance and rate your success.
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