Steps to Build Youtube Analytics Reports: A Comprehensive Guide

YouTube is basically the new television taking over the world. According to statistics, 79 percent of Internet users have their own YouTube account. With more than 37 million YouTube channels out there, it is highly probable that you, yes “you“, also run a YouTube channel of your own and are looking for ways to scale it further. Well, look no further! This article will provide you with in-depth knowledge about YouTube Analytics & will help you master the skill of efficiently using YouTube Analytics Reports to refine your channel’s performance and viewer engagement.

YouTube Studio provides at-a-glance and in-depth analytics to help you analyze your videos and your channel. YouTube Analytics will help you optimize your YouTube content preparation & promotion strategies. With YouTube Analytics Reports you can make sense of your YouTube Analytics Data and draw informative & data-driven insights about your channel’s performance & viewers.

Upon a complete walkthrough of this article, you will be able to improve and customize your YouTube Analytics reports to suit your needs and discuss available metrics, and graphs.

What is YouTube Analytics?

YouTube is one of the most popular and premier video-sharing platforms by Google that allows content creators, be it individuals or companies to create a channel and upload videos of all different kinds. With YouTube in place, you can create content and share it with the world for entertainment, business, or welfare purposes as well.

Any user that has a channel & uploads videos on YouTube is known as a YouTuber. YouTubers can have numerous roles such as Video Creator, Producer, Voice-Over Artists, Translator, Gamer, Vlogger, Editor, etc. that they play to keep their channel up and profitable. YouTube further provides all the creators with the YouTube Analytics functionality, allowing them to keep track of crucial metrics & statistics to help manage their channels better.

When you dive into YouTube Analytics, you’ll quickly be able to draw crucial viewer-driven insights about your audience by keeping track of metrics such as audience retention, real-time activities, etc. Simply put, YouTube Analytics Reports uncover an incredible wealth of information, from audience demographics to traffic sources such as direct, referral, and search keywords.

By default, 4 tabs, Overview, Reach, Engagement, Audience, and Revenue – are available for both your Channels and your individual Videos. Most people are aware of the obvious statistics in the Overview | Reach | Engagement | Audience | Revenue tabs. We will discuss some advanced features and combine metrics to get better insights. Also, check out our detailed guide on YouTube Analytics Data to understand it better.

Why YouTube Analytics is Needed?

You will be able to use YouTube Analytics and its numerous functionalities to optimize and refine your content, promotion, and viewer engagements strategies. Basically, you get access to an unexplored stash of data which can be used to answer questions like:

• What videos bring you, subscribers?
• Which videos are most watched? 
• At what point do your viewers drop off? 
• Which sections of a particular video/channel are most viewed? 
• What engages your audience and creates value? 
• What pitch leads to most conversions? 

With YouTube Analytics, you can compare the performance of your latest video with your typical video performance. You’ll see how it ranks against your last 10 videos along with its Views, Average View Duration, and Watch Time. A quick glance of your overall channel analytics includes your current subscribers, a summary of your views, watch time in the last 28 days, and your top videos from the last 48 hours.

You can have the analytics data for your channel as a whole, for a video group, or even for a specific video. We will discuss some ways to convert raw YouTube Analytics data into measurable insights that help optimize your marketing efforts. This will help convert visitors to viewers, then viewers to subscribers, and finally subscribers to clients. 

Youtube metrics tracked by YouTube Analytics

Here is an overview of some of the important YouTube metrics you should know about:

• Subscriber Count: The subscriber count gives an overview of how many organic views you can expect on your next video.
• Average View Duration and Percentage Viewed: The “Average View Duration” and “Average Percentage Viewed” tell you how long people want to watch your video and when they start going off. 
• Traffic Sources (Suggested Videos):  To get more traffic from the suggested videos, you should make relevant, and attractive thumbnails with catchy titles.
• Subscribers from Videos: You can track the subscriber count your videos are bringing you every day from the YouTube Analytics Reports. 
• Video Engagement Report: The overall performance of your channel narrows down to how engaging are your videos to the viewers.

A bit more effort will lead to broadening the client base and achieve regular repeat sales. 

What is YouTube Analytics Data?

YouTube records a lot of information/data about how viewers interact with the channel, and its videos by keeping track of metrics such as shares, likes, subscribers, playlists, etc. This data is known as YouTube Analytics Data. You can analyze this YouTube Analytics Data using the dashboard or using YouTube’s Analytics Functionality.

YouTube Analytics Data can be categorized across three different sections:

• Views: It shows the total number of channels & video-based views.
• Watch Time: It represents the watch time of your channel.
• Subscribers: It shows the total number of subscribers across all your channels.

How to access the Youtube Analytics reports?

Here are the steps to access the Youtube Analytics reports:

1. Login to YouTube Studio.
2. From the left menu, select Content.
3. Navigate to your video and select Analytics. You can also view your latest video performance from the channel dashboard. Click a video title or thumbnail.

YouTube Analytics Reports: Pairing Statistics

Go to the Audience tab, Select “Top subtitle/cc languages“, this will show the numbers of users watching your videos in different languages.
Also, from the “Reach” tab, go to “Advanced”, check “Subtitles and CC” inside the “More” dropdown.

It will also tell you what percent of watch time came from each subtitle/cc language. 

Keep an eye on two numbers here, the language with most viewers and the one with the least viewers. 

Next, Inside “Audience” check the “Other videos your audience watched” to check what other videos, outside your channels, your viewers watched. 

Now combine these two statistics, you will come to know two things:

1. If your audience is watching a particular language/subtitle outside your channels, you might want to add that language to your channels also. 

2. Along with increasing/improving content in the most popular language, the kind of videos your least popular language viewers are watching outside your channel, can give you an idea of their likes or dislikes and help you in improving your presentation/style.

YouTube Analytics Reports: Comparing Statistics

You need to compare your different analyses to get useful deeper insights from them. E.g. you would want to compare your channel growth rate between time frames/geographies/demographics/dimensions etc.

• Your “Impressions click-through rate” when viewed alongside your “Average view duration” will give an idea of how long viewers are sticking around after clicking the video thumbnail.
  
  E.g. Higher click-through rate with a low average view duration means that your thumbnails entice a user to view something but the actual content doesn’t meet viewers’ expectations, such low view duration videos are unlikely to be recommended by YouTube to other users. 
  Conversely, a lower click-through rate but high average view duration means your video is being recommended to an audience wider than your target, they find your content interesting but your thumbnails are getting fewer viewer clicks. 
  
  With time, your videos tend to get recommended to more and more audiences, increasing the views but lowering the click-through rate. 

• “When your viewers are on YouTube,” tells you times of the 24 hour day, when your channel gets the maximum visitors.
  
  If during these times there is someone responding to comments and creating posts, your viewership will likely increase. 

• “Audience demographics” can help you curate your content to suit a particular age/gender/location group, create proper subtitles and find ways to attract an audience from groups where your channels are not so popular. 

• “Top YouTube search terms” will let you know the search keywords that generate your traffic for you, and increase your SEO effectiveness. 

• “Video subscribers” with “Audience retention” will show you hard truths about whether your content is able to impress and make a connection with your viewers. 

• To make your videos interactive you can add clickable cards in between your videos, also you can add end screen elements that the viewer can interact with after the video has been fully played. 
  To see how often people clicked on a card or end screen of a specific video, look at “Clicks per card shown” and “End screen element click rate”.
  
  I would tend to give special discounts to people who came via an “End screen element click”, as apart from showing interest in my product, they also watched the video in full. 

• Suggested comparisons: Youtube analytics suggests some comparisons by default, like Period-over-Period showing your channel’s short-term growth and Year-over-year shows long-term growth.

Google Analytics for YouTube

Carrying out an insightful data analysis for your business requires having the ability to not only store or access data, but also to transform it into a form, that can help draw powerful and holistic insights using a YouTube Analytics Reporting tool. Google Analytics is one such tool for YouTube Analytics Reports. Google Analytics functionalities, processing power, and flexibility will add to your overall technical architecture.

Google Analytics is a robust Web Analytics Platform provided by Google, free of cost. It allows users to track the traffic on their website, channels, etc., and draw crucial insights about their customers’/viewers’ actions and behavior. It supports seamless integration with YouTube, allowing you to load and monitor your channel’s performance with ease. With Google Analytics in place, you can not only track visitors for your YouTube channel but also track users that decide to visit your website after your YouTube channel.

It allows you to carry out in-depth analysis by monitoring clicks, impressions, comments, likes, etc., and figure out the parts of your channel, that receive the most number of viewers, their demographics, and what are their views about your channel. It also allows you to monitor any other YouTube channels that your viewers’ visit and the actions they perform there.

In case you make use of multiple channels to generate channel traffic or clients, such as Adwords, social media pages, SMS, etc., Google Analytics can help you track the performance of all these channels. You can then discern how your YouTube and other marketing channels are helping you achieve your goals.

Choosing an ideal reporting tool that perfectly meets your business requirements can be a challenging task, especially when there’s a large variety of tools available in the market. You can take a look at our comprehensive list of Best Tools for YouTube Analytics Reports to simplify your search.

Some Useful Tips for YouTube Analytics Reports

Here are some tips to build better YouTube Analytics reports:

• Look for similarities between all videos that have high click-through rates. Do they have anything in common? Do the same exercise for all your low click-through rate videos. 

• If users often search for a specific video of yours, consider adding it to a playlist to help people quickly discover their desired or your related content.

• The “Subscribers” metric also tells you how many subscribers you have lost, the “Watch time” metric can tell you if the watch time for your videos is decreasing, the “Audience retention” metric also tells you where your users mostly drop off your video. 

• In general, retention will always gradually decline, your focus should be on abrupt drops. Upward peaks indicate viewers are re-watching certain parts of your video. 

• Dislikes can sometimes mean that your videos are hitting hard, if your focus is to reveal truths or unpleasant information, this could be a positive sign if your viewership has a positive increase. 

• Use a Bar chart – it’s good for comparisons, to know how different the scores are for 2 different criteria or how much a score has changed. Line charts – Depicts how much your data has changed over time, shows trends well. 

• Another fantastic ability Youtube provides is that you can group a number of videos and create your custom new group, to arrange similar pieces of content together and see their data in one place.

This grouping can change based on seasons, demand, demographics, etc. Hence, based on your current requirement or prevailing trends, you can get to know how a group/genre of your videos is doing. 

Conclusion

This article teaches you how to leverage the power of YouTube Analytics Reports to draw crucial insights into the performance of your YouTube channel. We have discussed how to use YouTube Analytics reports, track the right metrics, make intelligent combinations, and make your videos more popular. It also provides in-depth knowledge about metrics such as audience retention, real-time activities, traffic, etc. that you keep track of, to refine and optimize your content and strategies using the YouTube Analytics Reports.

Carrying out an in-depth analysis of your YouTube viewers requires you to integrate data from a diverse set of data sources. Integrating such diverse data can be challenging and tiresome, especially for a beginner & this is where Hevo saves the day. 

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Do you run a YouTube channel, and are looking to scale it up? Share your thoughts on these tips to build good YouTube Analytics Reports in the comments section below!