YouTube has stepped up their analytics reporting over the last few months and now offers a more useful range of reports to help you assess your channel’s performance. The insights contained in these reports can be used to hone your video marketing strategy and create content that better engages with your guests and drives more bookings.
Here’s a run-through of the most important metrics you need to know about and where you’ll find them.
Who Your Audience Is
It’s vital to know who actually watches your videos so you can determine if you’re reaching your target audience with your content, and if you are, plan ways to hone your strategy and keep them engaged.
You can quickly identify key audience data in the “Demographics” reports which are located in the View Reports section. It’s also possible to segment the data by subscribers-only to gain valuable demographic insights on your most engaged viewers.
Once you’ve identified your core audience, it’s also important to find out the devices your audience are using to watch your videos so you can tailor your content and promotion strategies accordingly. To access this data, simply check out the “Devices” report in the View Reports section for a breakdown of viewing duration by device.
Based on the insights you find in these reports, you can start to optimise your channel to better engage your target audience. You may even discover that your content has an unexpected audience overseas and decide to enhance your videos with subtitles and transcriptions to improve the user experience.
How Users Are Finding Your Videos
Identifying how most of your viewers are finding your videos is the first step to widening your reach.
You can find out where the bulk of your traffic is coming from in the View Reports section under “Traffic sources” and “Playback location”. When browsing these reports don’t forget to look at the average view duration column to gauge quality as well as quantity when it comes to your different traffic sources. Again, it’s possible to gain deeper insights into the value of your traffic sources by checking out subscriber data too.
How Engaging Your Videos Are
The data YouTube provides on audience engagement will help you determine if your videos are keeping your guests’ attention. This is important not only because you want to create high quality, interesting videos to spark your guests interest in your resort, but also because YouTube uses audience retention rates to determine the videos it displays in Search and “Suggested Videos” placements.
To find this information, you need to look at both the absolute and relative audience retention reports, which are located in the Views section.
The absolute audience retention report shows how many people watched your videos all the way through as a percentage of the total number of views. It allows you to identify the exact point in your videos where viewers are losing interest and clicking away. If most of your viewing drop offs are occurring early on in the video, it might be that your thumbnail or description is misleading viewers and therefore not meeting their expectations when they start watching the content.
The relative audience retention report compares your data on viewer retention during playback to other videos on YouTube of similar length.
How Well Your Annotations are Working For You
YouTube annotations are a great way to prompt your viewers to check out your other videos, build your subscription base and add clickable CTA’s to your videos to drive bookings.
You can monitor the performance of your annotations within the “annotations” report in the Engagement section, where you’ll find both the click-through and close rates for each annotation.
Based on this data, you might choose to switch up your annotations with new copy, change the length of time they appear in the video, or even whereabouts they appear on the screen (annotations towards the bottom of the screen could get obscured by overlay ads).
Do you use YouTube analytics reporting as part of your video marketing campaign? Let us know in the comments below.
