Once you start creating videos, keeping an eye on the statistics you can find in various analytics solutions can ensure your videos improve over time. Let’s look at how to find those stats and how to use them to make better videos that get more views.
Audience Retention
The most important stat to look at first is audience retention. This metric measures how much of your video your viewers watched.
People today have short attention spans. If your video has a long lead in, runs credits, or starts off boring, you will lose your viewers. If most of them leave at the same point you can tell what it is they did not like enough to keep watching.
Find Out What the Most Common Mistake in Creating Videos Is Click To TweetMake the beginning of your video as compelling as possible. That is NOT the place to put a slide about your company name or how they can reach you or what you want to sell them. Those all belong AT THE END! That is the most common mistake I see when evaluating videos.
Your videos should not be commercials. They should be entertaining or educational and END with what you have to offer. If you put your business pitch at the beginning before you offer any value, you will drive your viewers away. Put it at the end after you have made a compelling case for why they need you or they are happy that you entertained them.
Relative audience retention shows how your retention scores compared to all other YouTube videos. Different video types will have very different audience retention. A better metric would be to compare your own videos against each other.
Sudden drops in audience retention indicate portions of your videos that your audience found boring.Click To TweetSudden drops in audience retention indicate portions of your videos that your audience found boring or at least less interesting. Determine what is happening on a video when you see many stop watching. Avoid that. Are there parts of your videos with high audience retention? Do more of that.
More tips on improving your videos:
- Smile a lot
- At the beginning, tell your viewers how they will benefit from watching
- Have something new or changing every 4-5 seconds
These tips are from Video Creators channel and specifically 5 Tips for Increasing Audience Retention.
How to Get to YouTube Video Analytics
Do you even know how to get to the analytics YouTube provides? The easiest way is to go to YouTube analytics. Or you can click on your username in the top right corner and click on Video Manager. Look down the left side and find and click on Analytics. That should open many options you can select.
Watch a video how-to on how to find YouTube analytics and what to look at when you do. Click To TweetHere is a short video on what you may want to look at in YouTube Analytics:
Video Highlights:- Audience Retention
- Playback Locations
- Demographics
- Annotations
Using Cyfe to Analyze YouTube Statistics
YouTube Analytics are not the only method for analyzing how your videos are doing on YouTube. Popular blogger, podcaster and vlogger Ms. Ileane (Ileane Smith) from BetterBlogTips prefers to use Cyfe for YouTube Analytics. She created a video explaining how she set it up and why she prefers it to the analytics already in YouTube.
Highlights:- Cyfe makes it easier to track the performance of a specific video
- How to add YouTube related widgets
- Demographics / top countries
- Views / Likes / Comments / New subscribers
- Average view duration
- Top 10 videos
As you can see, Cyfe is far simpler to understand than most analytics. If you want to track results for your latest videos, or specific videos you want to monitor more closely, Cyfe is the easiest way.
Top Videos
If you see that some of your top viewed videos have something in common, consider making more videos of that type. Think back to where each video was promoted. Where did you publish them besides YouTube? Where did you share them? Are their influencers who like your videos enough to use them in their content or share them with their followers?
If a blogger has used your video in their content before, reach out to them and ask if there are any videos they would like to see you make. Be easy to contact. I once asked Ileane to make a video for a post I was doing because I felt my audience needed to see how the solution was used. I knew to ask her because I’ve seen her other videos. If she wanted to be featured she could ask me what I need. Or like today, I might come across her video and decide it would make my post more compelling to include her.
Using Demographics Data
You may discover that some of your videos appeal to a specific audience demographic. If mostly people of a certain age or sex like videos, use that information to decide where to promote them. For example, if one video is popular with young women, consider sharing it on Pinterest. If you see a lot of traffic coming in from a particular social network, focus more on promoting it and similar videos on that network.
How to Use Google Analytics for YouTube Data
You can also see how much traffic YouTube is sending to your site by using the steps in The Easy Way to Track Traffic from YouTube for Video Marketing. What you put in the details of each video will greatly impact how much traffic your videos can drive to your site. Always take advantage of that space to link to your site.
You can also add clickable links directly on your videos. This is done in the YouTube dashboard after you upload your video. (The clickable links you see on videos are not actually IN the video.)
Don’t forget to promote your videos on your own site and across your social media accounts. To add a video to a post, click share, embed, choose a size (usually 560, 600 or 640 depending upon the width of the blogging area), and paste into the TEXT area of WordPress. (Text is next to Visual under the title on the far right above your content.)
Create great videos, give them compelling descriptions, and add tags so that other bloggers can find them. I’ve mentioned three videos in this post because I found them on YouTube. I knew only one of the three people who created these videos. Yours could end up in my next post – or any other blogger’s next post – but only if you take the time to make your videos easy to find.
If you come across a post about a video you already have, why not send the blogger a tweet with a link to your video? I often update my existing content and add videos as I come across them. Who knows – your video could end up featured on a major site.
Find out more in Use Dashboards to Create, Improve and Promote Videos Online [VIDEOS]
