YouTube! It’s kind of a big deal. Owned by Google, YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, after, you guessed it, Google.
There are tons of folks out there that are literally making a living at YouTube, by being vloggers. It’s all kinda crazy, but welcome to the brave new world!
Like all the social networking tools we’ve looked at so far in this series, you want to analyze your stats for a couple of reasons: first off, you want to see what’s working (and conversely, what’s not). YouTube has pretty awesome analytics, which is probably not surprising, given that they are owned by Google.
Here’s what you can learn from your YouTube Analytics:
If you log into your channel, you’ll see at the top of the page, in the middle, a little button that will have some numbers on it. Click on it, and it will take you to your analytics.
Again, like many analytics, you want to look at how your overall account is doing, and then you want to look at how each individual video is doing.
Subscribers: for people who are hardcore about YouTube, and trying to monetize it, your overall number of subscribers is the golden standard for judging your success or failure. For more info, check out Dottotech’s Getting to 100K Subscribers series.
Snapshot: this will give you an overall look at how your channel and individual videos are doing.
Top 10 videos: YouTube ranks your top 10 most popular videos, in terms of views. What can you learn from your most popular videos? You should make more like that.
Demographics: which countries do the people who are watching your videos live in? and are they male or female? This is great information for you to know, so you can tailor your videos for that specific demographic.
Acquisition and playback: How are people watching your video? Is it embedded in your blog, or on YouTube? How are they finding it in search?
What kind of device: how are they watching? Computer or mobile device?
Audience retention: the longer people are watching your videos without clicking away, the better it is for your SEO.
So, as you can see, YouTube Analytics are pretty detailed. They offer all the same features on each individual video, as well.
Until next week!