YouTube Optimization Series, Part 4: Video Analytics – the Metrics That Matter

Posted on Jul 15, 2012 in Digital Visibility, Social Media Optimization | 0 comments

After your initial optimization work, using YouTube Analytics to stay on top of the metrics that matter is critical to ensure your content remains optimized. You can think of these metrics as a proxy for what your viewers think about your channel, and your viewers remain an invaluable source to help guide you as to what content you should be producing.

The way to begin is to analyze your most popular videos within YouTube Analytics, and then start working backward.

Key metrics to investigate include:

Metric	Implication(s)
Video Popularity	- Annotate popular videos to drive traffic to new videos or website - Test creation of new videos with similar content elements
Viewership by day and week	Modify your release schedule to correspond to most popular viewership days
Unique Views vs Overall Viewers	Understand your content “stickiness”
Gain or Loss of video subscribers	Understand which videos drive most subscribes, Measure impact of including a subscribe CTA
Actions as ratio of total views	- Understand which videos get most engagement - Measure impact of CTAs for comments, favorites in your videos
Traffic to Channel	Determine areas of opportunity to increase popular & less popular referrers
Traffic to Video
Video view retention	- Examine how your video performance compared to other videos of same length - Identify most (peaks) and least popular (drops) video areas – these patterns highlight potential changes to your content
Video demographics	Identify what content resonates with certain demographic & geographic segments. If content is performing well in foreign country, consider translation & subtitles.

Source: YouTube Analytics

One of the fun things about YouTube analytics is that you can utilize it almost like a science lab. Based on the data that you have collected – analyzing the “peaks of success” and the areas that haven’t been as successful – you can make strategic optimizations like creating videos with more relevant content and applying new calls to action.  Then after making the changes, you should of course monitor the metrics again to see how your optimizations fared.

If your efforts result in more popularity or traffic, you’re on the right track, if not, you can assess why not and then try a different tack.

In this way, you can be ensured of a continually optimized YouTube channel presence.

In the 5^th and final installment of this series, Asset Optimization – Tying it all Together, we will examine results that these YouTube optimizations have had in practice for our clients, and show you how your YouTube optimization efforts can fit into the larger picture of social asset optimization, and social media optimization.

ZOG Digital can be reached at info@zogdigital.com, or through our website: www.zogdigital.com.