YouTube, the Google-owned video network, boasts over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet, watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.

How can you make sure your YouTube channel marketing videos are doing their job? Here’s how to use key metrics to track your YouTube video performance.

At this point in time, just about everyone knows about YouTube. There’s no need to trot out the impressive statistics regarding YouTube use. We all know that when it comes to videos and your marketing strategy, you absolutely need YouTube video content. Start a new channel now. Here are the step-by-step to creating your YouTube channel for either personal channel or small business channels. Remember to optimize your YouTube SEO by customize channel with a detail video description, and add a good cover art.

However, not everyone knows how to check if these YouTube videos are doing what they’re supposed to do. You have to track and analyze the performance of these videos so you can be guided on your long-term YouTube video marketing strategy. Fortunately, you have YouTube Analytics to use that can provide you with the insights you need.

Here are the particular metrics that you need to focus on:

Watch Time

Plenty of people tend to focus on the number of views that a video in YouTube can get. It’s true that it’s a crucial sign of success for a video.

But it’s more important to note the Watch Time. This is the total number of minutes that people spend watching your content. Taken together, the number of views and the total watch time give you a more accurate idea of how interested people really care about your video.

Real-Time Number of Views

The Real-Time Report gives you the number of views that a video has gotten over the last 60 minutes and over the past 48 hours. You can get this report for particular videos, or for your channel as a whole.

By checking this metric out, you can identify moments when your videos suddenly enjoy a spike in popularity. It’s possible that your video has been shared by someone with a very large audience, in a forum thread or a popular publication.

You can use the YOUTUBE-ID -site:youtube.com Google search query to find out where your videos have been shared so you can engage with these people further.

Traffic Sources

Where are your viewers coming from? You can get this info from the Traffic Sources page, so you can get an idea of where your traffic is coming from. You can then find out if they’re coming from YouTube advertising, YouTube search, playlists, video annotations, or channel pages.

You can determine which traffic source is most helpful for your videos and then you can optimize your videos even better. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from your few playlists or video annotations, then you may want to do more playlists and add more annotations. If the traffic is mostly from YouTube search, you can make sure that your future videos are optimized for the right keywords.

Demographics

Here you can find out the age bracket and gender of your viewers. You can even find out in which state in the US your viewers are based. For a business, this is a truly crucial bit of information. It tells you if your videos are being watched by your intended consumer base. If you’re only selling to the West Coast in the US, for example, then having millions of viewers in New York won’t matter. But it tells you to expand your delivery services to NYC, doesn’t it?

Playback Locations

The playback location information tells you whether your videos are seen when the viewer is on YouTube, or the videos are viewed on external sites. Basically, it tells you where your viewers are so you can then focus more on the right platform. You’ll know whether to boost your efforts in optimizing your videos for YouTube search, or you’re better off focusing on embedding your videos on many other external sites.

Audience Retention

The number of views may be important, but so is the quality. In the Audience Retention page of the YouTube Analytics panel, you’ll be able to find out at which point your viewers quit watching.

The reality of YouTube videos is that for many of these videos, not everyone will watch the video till the end. You can find out where most people suddenly leave the video, so you can note whether the video length is too long or if your video continued to discuss a topic for which many of your viewers found wanting.

You get the average view duration time, as well as the average percentage of the video viewed. You get a graph of the absolute audience retention telling you which parts of the video are most popular and which parts the viewers are skimming past.

There’s also a relative audience retention graph, telling you how well your video does compare to other videos with similar lengths. This gives you a better idea regarding the performance of your video.

Subscribers Rate

This report gives you your number of subscribers, as well as the number of subscribers gained and lost per video you put up. Obviously, you’ll want to put up videos that gain you more subscribers while it loses you fewer subscribers. If you have a video that causes a massive loss of subscribers, you may want to remove that video to mitigate the damage!

Number of Social Shares

This tells you the number of shares that your video got through social media platforms like Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail, or copy to Clipboard. This can help you generate a better strategy for using social media to promote your YouTube videos.

Comments

Components are very informative signs of audience engagement. You can find out how well people like (or dislike) your videos, and what kinds of debates are being generated by the video. You’re also able to note the dates of the comments, so you’ll find out if it’s no longer garnering attention.

You can also use the comments section to further engage with your audience. You can respond to questions, share jokes, and perhaps even suggest your other content for viewers to discover.

Likes and Dislikes

This is a well-known metric that’s easy enough to understand. Obviously, you will want more likes and fewer dislikes. If a video gets plenty of likes, then you can use that to generate similar videos. But if it gets too many dislikes, you can investigate the reason for this so that you can avoid a similar failure in the future.

Conclusion

The built-in YouTube Analytics dashboard is your only source of analytics data. You can also try other 3rd party tools like Google Trends, VidIQ.com, and Social Blade. These will give you more stats to help you form an accurate picture of how your YouTube videos are really doing.

Also, check this post – How to Maximize Your Digital Marketing Budget in 2019