When it comes to social media marketing, many brands tend to focus on Facebook and Twitter. Yet, video has proven to yield tremendous impact in terms of boosting a brand’s relevance. In fact, YouTube boasts more than one billion unique users monthly, with 40 percent of that traffic coming from mobile users.
Video offers a number of important benefits, including the ability to level the playing field. Even if you operate a startup and do not have much of a marketing budget, you can still compete with video. As is the case with any type of marketing, you must ensure that the content you post is worth the investment by demonstrating viable results.
Without the proper measurement tools, it can often feel as though you are swimming upstream in terms of trying to measure results. Fortunately, YouTube has provided a robust analytics tool that makes it easier for you to see exactly what is or is not working with your YouTube marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, if you are not experienced with using the dashboard, it is somewhat overwhelming. As a result, there is quite a bit of vital data that you might be missing if you are not leveraging the dashboard to its full capacity.
Audience Retention Rate and Why It Matters
First and foremost, it is important to recognize that among the most important pieces of data presented on the dashboard is audience retention. Why is this analytic so important? It tells you if your videos have what it takes to retain your audience’s attention and keep them watching. Videos that are unfocused, boring, or even too long will often have a low audience retention rate. Too often, marketers focus on the number of views their videos received. While that is an important number, the true standard of your video’s quality is how many people actually make it through the video. You could easily have a large number of views, but if only a handful of people are making it through to the end of your video, you need to investigate further to find out why people are losing interest.
Tracking Traffic Sources
You will find that there is a tremendous amount of data presented in the analytics dashboard. One element that you need to track on a regular basis is how viewers find your videos. This information is presented in the traffic sources data. For instance, are viewers actually searching for your videos, or do they come to them through suggestions? You should also pay close attention to the device reports because that indicates how viewers watch your videos. For instance, are viewers watching your videos on mobile devices, or on traditional desktops? This information is vital to your overall marketing campaign as it reveals your most effective video marketing channels.
Does the Number of Subscribers Really Matter?
From time to time, you will see reports about breakout brands on YouTube that have racked up an insane number of subscribers. While it would be nice to have a large subscriber base, recognize that a large number of subscribers is important only if most of those subscribers are actually watching your videos. A far more important analytic is overall views over time. In order to more accurately judge the effectiveness of your campaigns, you need to focus on traffic that is driven by embeds, social media shares, external links, and keywords. Overall views over time are a much more accurate predictor of that type of traffic than the number of subscribers you have to your channel.
Finally, keep in mind that although the wealth of information presented through YouTube’s Analytics dashboard is significant, it is not the only information available. If you only use YouTube’s dashboard, you will likely miss out on trending information from networks such as Facebook and Twitter that could provide valuable insights into your campaign. In order to truly understand trends as they relate to your video marketing efforts, make sure that you are not putting all of your eggs into one basket. Be sure to also leverage the power of other tools. Among the tools you should be using is SocialBlade. SocialBlade is different from YouTube’s analytics dashboard in that it has the added benefit of providing statistics for your competitors. With this tool, you can gain insight into how your competitors’ videos are performing, and then tweak your own videos to ensure that your brand remains competitive. While all of the information presented is available publicly, SocialBlade gathers everything together into a convenient location. can also prove to be beneficial for helping you to track a variety of analytics related to your YouTube marketing campaigns.
YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool. The right analytics will help you to leverage that power.
