Now that you have your professional video, what next? If you are like most businesses, YouTube is likely the main outlets you use to reach out to your intended audience. However, to ensure it achieves what you need it to achieve, it does not stop with posting. You need a continuous process of monitoring. Thankfully, the parent company Google has introduced a useful monitoring tool to help you understand how and if your video content works. It’s called YouTube Analytics.
What Will YouTube Analytics Show?
YouTube Analytics, when used effectively, can help you develop an outreach strategy for your video content. New tools and functions are added all the time but generally focus on a few key information types such as viewer demographics – age, gender and who and where they are, as well as the devices they use. It also explains how they are engaging with your videos. This may be more useful to you, especially in 2019 as the analytics looks much deeper than it once did. Now, you can see:
- How much of your video they watch (for example, how many people watch all of it and how many click away before it finishes)
- Whether they use any interactive tools such as watching more of your videos or clicking a redirect to your website
- Retention – looking at consistency and when they interact with content (viewers may not immediately click an embedded link but return to do so later at a more convenient time)
- Reactions such as likes and dislikes, shares, and embedded in websites and on social media
How to Use This Information
If your video is receiving far fewer interactions than you would have hoped, or traffic is particularly low, you should consider whether the problem is the video’s visibility. Assuming you’ve applied all the correct technical elements such as metadata and you’re sharing on other platforms, the issue may be with how the video is presented. For maximum exposure, a video requires maximum appeal and clarity. This is where the power of the analytics can help.
Video description should always include keywords: Google’s keyword planner is useful for your videos as well as your written SEO content. The more high-performing (and relevant) keywords you use in your description – including the video title – the higher the chance of gaining more traffic and more importantly, relevant traffic. The right tags will help YouTube users find your content off-site and on-site.
Place interactive tools effectively: Buttons to visit a landing page or to see other videos on a similar subject should go where you receive the most engagement or traffic, and at places before where the analytics suggests that interest begins to drop off. Many viewers will not watch a video in its entirety; they tend to leave once they have the information for which they came. Capture that traffic before it disappears.
Look at the comments: It has been suggested that the number of comments your videos receive are more important than any other element. YouTube is, after all, a social media site. If your traffic is low despite these other efforts, perhaps your description, your video SEO and your embedded interactive tools simply are not doing enough to encourage comments? Sign off with a text or even an overlay encouraging feedback or asking a question.