YouTube Analytics 201: More Channel Stats To Watch

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You’ve read our YouTube analytics 101 article and you’ve made tweaks to your video strategy based on what your analytics are telling you. Now, what should you look at next?

More YouTube analytics to watch:

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Sharing statistics

 

Under “Engagement reports,” you can view the shares of your YouTube videos. First, you’ll see a graph like the above, Underneath the graph, you can select to view shares by video, sharing service, geography, date, or subscription status.

There’s a few things you could do with this information:

  • You get general information about which videos are performing the best: It’s always good to see which videos are performing well across different types of metrics. If one type of video tends to perform better with social shares, and another one tends to perform better as far as current subscribers watching it, you can balance the two kinds of videos. That way, you’re drawing new people to your channel, while still keeping your subscribers happy.
  • You get more information on your viewers: Checking the geography and subscription status tabs lets you see what videos your subscribers are sharing (if any) and where people who share your videos are located (and, as mentioned in the other article, see if it might be a good idea to add subtitles in other languages). You can look at videos that have a high amount of non-subscribers sharing them and add an annotation prompting them to subscribe (or with a link to another video to keep them watching).
  • You can start adjusting your social strategy: If all of your social shares are happening via Twitter, then you should probably be active there and sharing snippets of your videos (plus saying thank you to people who’ve shared your content!). Likewise for Facebook or other public platforms.

 

Annotation and card statistics

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Also underneath “Engagement reports,” you can find reports on annotations and card statistics.

Under “Annotations,” you’ll be able to see the click through rate and close rate, as well as drilling down into the annotation type, geography, date, and subscription status. You can use these stats to see how useful your annotations are in general, but also see how they’re doing with non-subscribers.

If your goal with the annotation is to convert non-subscribers to subscribers, you can try a few different versions of the call to action to subscribe in different videos. Then, you can drill down to see which versions are working by clicking “Subscription status,” then “Non-subscribers” to see which videos are getting the most interaction on their annotations. From there, you can figure out which call to action is the most effective, and then add that into your other videos.

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Under “Cards,” you’ll see similar breakdowns. You can see which card people are clicking on, what card types are most effective, the videos that are getting the most clicks. By clicking “More,” you can also view geography and date statistics. The takeaways here are mostly the same as with annotations.

 

Apps to keep you organized:

There are so many analytics to keep track of — even in the last two articles, we haven’t been able to cover them all! So if you need something to help you keep track of them and keep an eye on the important ones, here’s a few apps that can help:

 

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VidIQ is a YouTube certified app that gives you a dashboard to view all of your analytics, as well as keyword recommendations and information on which of your videos are performing well (both right now and over time). They offer a free basic plan, and their paid plans start at $10/month, so it’s a very accessible way to take an analytics-focused approach to your videos.

 

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If you already use Hootsuite (which has both free and paid plans), you should definitely look at their YouTube analytics app. It integrates with your existing Hootsuite dash to give you analytics inside the app and let you like, comment, and reply to comments from within Hootsuite. It doesn't add additional information or suggestions like VidIQ, but it does make your existing analytics more easily accessible if you’re an existing Hootsuite user.

Other potential options include Dasheroo (which is a business analytics dashboard that integrates with YouTube) and ChannelMeter (which has a free trial and states on their pricing page that they have pricing available for channels who don’t need the enterprise plan yet).

The sooner you start paying attention to your analytics, the sooner you can use them to improve your YouTube results — so pick an app and play around with it, keeping an eye on the stats discussed in this post and the previous one. And if you want to stay in the loop on future blog posts, make sure to sign up for the email list!

Michelle Nickolaisen

Written by Michelle Nickolaisen

Michelle Nickolaisen is a staff writer at Postwell based in Austin, TX.