I’m just going to say it — Analytics are BORING.
I’d rather listen to some monotone Senator drone endlessly about the Farm Bill on CSPAN than sit and stare at numbers all day. (Ok… maybe that’s not true… but it’s close!)
But, what if analytics could actually make you money? Affect your bottom line? Help you define your customer avatar?
Your YouTube analytics can do all three… you just need to know where and what to look for.
The amount of insight you’re able to gather about your audience and the ability to gauge their interest in your content is incredible.
But, the goldmine is in the data about website traffic, lead generation, and sales for your business.
I’m going to show you 5 ways to use YouTube analytics to not only better the performance of your videos…. but how to optimize your BUSINESS as a whole.
But first, let’s start with the basics…
Where to Find Your YouTube Analytics
(If you don’t have a YouTube channel yet, don’t worry – here’s how to get started and how we generated 140,000 free leads from YouTube!)
Click the “Creator Studio” button in the top right hand corner and scroll down to annotations.
You’ll immediately see a detailed list of metrics.
Now, the fun part.
I’ll save you the trouble of deciphering, and explain the data you need to concentrate on.
1. Use YouTube Analytics to Craft the Perfect Marketing Message
Do you know who’s actually watching your videos?
What if I told you that your viewing audience may be completely different than what you expected?
By clicking on the demographics tab, you can quickly determine the age and location of the people actually watching your YouTube videos.
You can see above that 94% of our viewers for Freak Athletics are male, and 95% of our viewers are between the ages of 13-34.
This makes it clear that our vertical jump training videos are being seen by the ATHLETE and not the parent. The typical age of an athlete’s parent who is looking to jump higher would be in the 35-44 age group, which is only 8% of my viewership.
The moral of the story is that once you actually KNOW who’s watching your YouTube videos – you can adjust your voice and language to connect to them.
For example, I’d talk to the “athlete” different in my videos than I talked to the parent.
“Hey man, you’re here to jump higher!” instead of “If you have a child looking to jump higher…”
Being able to craft your marketing message to appeal to your EXACT viewers is POWERFUL.
2. Use Analytics to Rank Higher in Search
How engaging are your videos?
Does your audience enjoy your content?
You may think so – but how do you know for sure?
Do they watch every second? Or do they leave immediately?
If you scroll down to your video “Retention Rate” you can see the average watch time for each video.
Retention rate is VERY important because it’s what Google uses to judge whether your video is interesting to viewers.
Higher retention rate = higher search rankings.
If you can keep the attention of your audience the longest, you WIN!
If your average audience retention us under 25%, I highly recommend you decrease the length of your videos.
Why? This means that…
- your videos aren’t being seen by the right audience (they aren’t interested)
- your videos aren’t engaging, or you aren’t providing the content that the viewer expected when they clicked on your video
How to increase your retention rate? Put yourself in your viewers shoes.
Because our market is 13-17 year olds, we know that they have a very “eager” attention span that causes them to leave videos quickly!
The easiest way to maintain watch time is to create content your target audience is starving for and deliver it quickly and effectively.
Tip: After you’ve collected enough data, start to decrease the length of your videos moving forward to match your ideal “retention time”. This will increase the percentage of video watched!
3. Use YouTube Analytics To Increase Traffic to Your Website
This step is where we start to really optimize our BUSINESS. We’re talking website traffic, leads, and sales.
Our goal is to turn as many viewers into leads as possible. This is done through YouTube annotations (they’re kind of like clickable billboards that allow you to send traffic from videos to your website).
By looking at individual video analytics you can see dips and spikes within your video where viewers are engaged, and when the majority leave.
Once you verify when your traffic is typically leaving each video, you will want to add an annotation to visit your website (ideally your lead magnet) about 10 seconds before.
Analytics tell us that the average viewer is about to leave your video. Let’s turn as many of these soon to exit viewers into leads as possible!
Add an “Associated Website” annotation right before the dip with a clear call to action to give the viewer a reason to click!
You can see a dramatic increase in views to your website and leads by simply adding an annotation to your website before the viewer leaves.
4. Use YouTube Analytics to Increase Annotation Conversion
Hands down my favorite analytics feature is the ability to see “Click Through Rates” on your annotations.
By viewing annotation CTR’s you can actually see which annotations are connecting with your viewers and which aren’t!
- Inside of Annotation Analytics, you can track CTR for each annotation you display.
- By adjusting the time of the annotations, you will likely see a large bump in conversion
- Next, adjust the COPY of your annotation to match higher converting annotation copy from other videos. Aim to have at least a 1% CTR on your annotations for your free gift.
5. Use YouTube Analytics to Collect Data for Paid Advertising
Using analytics is extremely important when it comes to gathering information for paid advertising.
You can use YouTube analytics to craft the perfect marketing message and define your targeting when it comes to paid advertising… whether thats on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
By seeing which videos get the most views, you can decipher which subjects of your videos are most popular to your market.
This allows you to create ads that hit pain points or spark interest for your market.
In terms of targeting, you can use with analytics is to really dial in on the people that are actually watching your videos.
As you can see, you can look at the most popular countries, gender, and age group of the people that are watching your videos.
For example, for our channel 92 percent of the viewers are males. So we are going run ads to offers that relate more to them.
Also we have 3 different age groups that consume most of our videos. 13-17 year olds, 18-24 year olds and 25-34 year olds. This is so important not only when it comes to creating different offers but targeting as well.
So our ideal customer that we want to target would be a 18-34 year old male from the United States.
As you can see, YouTube analytics are a GOLD MINE of information you can use to optimize and grow your business.
You can leverage this data to not only get more views on YouTube, but to turn those views into subscribers, leads, and sales.
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