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Kick Your YouTube Views Into High Gear: Video Analytics [VIDEO How-Tos]

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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.

Karate Guy Kicking red box with YouTube Label: Kick Your YouTube Views Into High Gear

 

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 Tweet

Make 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 Tweet

Sudden 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 Tweet

Here 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]

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Gail Gardner

Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap
Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist who mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.
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Comments

  2. First of all i want to say thanks a lot for this post.
    I wanted to know information about video analytic, and here you posted it 🙂
    This very unique and useful topic to know how you tube video analytic works.
    You have explained it in very easy and understandable way.
    before i was follwing this site seo tools

    Reply

  3. Hi Gail,
    Good article you have written. I always read your article. Using Cyfe to Analyze YouTube Statistics is very good. thanks for this great article.

    Reply

  9. Thank you for such an informative article! YouTube is a great channel to make the videos go viral. I have never used the analytics for Youtube. Looking forward to use YouTube analytics for my YouTube channel.

    Reply

  11. Really nice themes, Great tutorial!Thanks for sharing.I’m into all of the above, except the Cyfe. It’s much easier with… Is a must have solution for your accounting needs. Thanks for the article again.

    Reply

  12. Youtube is the most successful way to make things viral in just a matter of time. Once when I started making videos, I did a blunder which I thought was a good thing to do as I was a newcomer that time. In my first slide only I posted who I am what My company do rather than telling people what this video is about.
    Aditya Antil would love you to read ..Why Does Ecommerce Website Design Matter?My Profile

    Reply

  13. Creating Videos in hosting Niche is one of my target for 2015 and I hope to create at least 100 videos in the year. I am really confident that I will be able to achieve my target. I am new to YouTube marketing and will definitely check my stats using Cyfe though I know that market is too competitive.
    Andrew would love you to read ..JustHost Review and FeaturesMy Profile

    Reply

    • Hi Andrew,

      Thanks for commenting. Be sure to include the words you want each video to be found for when you upload them. They can be edited any time if you haven’t been doing it. Before you make more videos, go search on YouTube for topics you want to cover. Then focus on the ones that don’t already have pages of relevant videos. It will be easier for you to get many views if your video meets a need people have that hasn’t been met yet.
      Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Do Not Let Your Images Blow Up Your BlogMy Profile

      Reply

  14. This is great advice, but knowing me I probably won’t go this route. Why not? I’m actually not selling or marketing anything except myself, and marketing me means marketing myself as kind of a storyteller and “thought leader”; I always wanted to say that. lol Overall, with everything I do I really don’t have the time to really dig deep into a lot of this stuff. Maybe one day, when I have that $10 million in the bank, I can pay someone to handle that part for me. 🙂
    Mitch Mitchell would love you to read ..Courage; Can You Be Courageous?My Profile

    Reply

    • Hi Mitch,

      Until someone gets serious about making money on YouTube they aren’t likely to even know YouTube even has analytics. There are some people who are making big money there, so they most likely are using their analytics to determine what videos are most popular. Then they can promote those more elsewhere and create more similar content.
      Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Do Not Let Your Images Blow Up Your BlogMy Profile

      Reply

  15. okay.. thanks for the share, this learn me how about to get analystic for youtube.. but why we are want to know about that? because now youtube have a view in every video at youtube,, so if you have a video at youtube, maybe i think you can only see the view.. im sorry this just my mind 😀
    agen sbobet would love you to read ..Agen Bola – Simeone Yang Minta Pulangkan TorresMy Profile

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