How To Use YouTube Analytics To Grow Your Channel Fast!

If you're looking at the right things inside of your YouTube analytics, you're seriously going to get all the information that you need to grow your YouTube channel. Whether you have a small channel and you're just getting started or you have a large channel. I'm going to walk you through everything that you should be looking at inside of your YouTube analytics to make sure you're doing all the right things to grow your channel. And if you stay to the end of this video, I'm going to share with you some advanced analytic tactics that I use to help grow my channel and that we help with all of our clients inside of our agency. You're not going to want to miss this. Before I go ahead and walk you through everything, I kind of want to give a disclaimer here. YouTube analytics can be a huge time suck and a demotivator. Yeah, I'm going to say that's a word. Reason being when you start to dive into your analytics and you start looking at your numbers, it can start to make you feel like you suck. Especially if you look at your audience retention graph and it's not so good, but you feel like you spent so much, so much time creating a really good video. You've really got to analyze your content in the eye of the viewer, in what your viewer really wants. Because if you want to grow a YouTube channel, it's about what the viewer wants to see and not necessarily what you want to do. So I highly recommend you put a timer on the amount of time you are going to spend in your analytics because there are a lot of rabbit holes that you could go deep inside of. I'm going to give you all the quick and dirty numbers and analytics you should be looking at. But keep that in mind. And if you have time to spend in your analytics, absolutely do it. But I also understand if you're juggling a lot of things like your business and other social platforms, set a timer for me. What I do, myself and my team spend a little time every single week, not only in my channel, but our client's channel. So every single Monday is a deep dive for us. We have all of our clients, we take a look at their previous week's data, we look at the previous week's video, we look at the previous week's audience retention. So, so that we can help give feedback on the next batch of videos that they are going to film or that I'm going to film Again, if you don't have that time, I would suggest blocking two hours at the end of every single month to dive into everything I'm about to show you here. It's kind of like a monthly analytic report or a monthly review of your channel to again make sure you're focusing on the right things so you can continue to grow your channel. So let me show you how to do that. When you first log into your YouTube channel, you're going to see your channel dashboard, the quick data you're going to get from here. And this is a lot of great data. You could really get quite a bit of information just from this page alone. So let me walk you through what you should look at here. The first thing you're going to see is your most recent video and how well it's performing based on your last 10. You can see this one that we did from 3 days and 25 minutes ago is ranking 7 out of 10 videos. When you click on this, you can see how the other videos or which videos actually performed better. The next thing you can see as well, right here is your click through rate for that last video. This is really important for us. One thing that we do is we track that for those first 48 hours and figure out and test different things we can do to make that video's click through rate go up in the first 48 hours. One of my goals for every single video that I do put out and for my clients videos is to try to always keep my most recent video in the top five. If I know it's in the top five, I know it's performing well, I know it's getting more views and it's helping me continue that trajectory to growing my channel. You can also get a quick look at your current subscribers, how many you've grown in the last 28 days, how, how many views, how much watch time, and obviously how much money you've made. You can also see your top videos in the last 48 hours. This could help you determine what kind of content you may want to create because these are the top three videos that people are currently actively watching on your channel. If you create more videos around those topics that could potentially help your channel grow because you're giving the viewer what they want. You can also get a look of your most recent comments and if you have any posts over here on your community tab, any responses you can see. I did a poll and most recent subscribers and what I do like is if you ever wonder what's going on in here, YouTube also has this what's New in Studio to help you really learn more about the YouTube studio because again they Want to give you as much information to be successful on the platform. Okay, now that's just an overview. Let's get into the nitty gritty. We're going to go over here to the analytics tab and I'm going to show you the analytics tab and then I want to show you how to go into each individual video and figure out why one of your videos maybe did really well and why one didn't do so well. So. So keep watching. One thing to remember here is you're looking at a specific time frame. Right now you're looking at 28 days with smaller channels. Sometimes it's really hard to get enough data out of 28 days. So you may want to come up here and you want to go back to the last 90 days so you can get even more data to help you make decisions. So like I said, I'm going to do the quick and dirty here. I'm going to go through each one of these tabs and show you which things you should be looking at that are really going to help you make tweaks and changes to continue to grow your channel. So right here in the overview tab, you're going to see your views in the last 90 days, your watch times, subscribers, all of that. If there is a little explanation mark here, if you just hover over it, YouTube's going to tell you what's going on. It says the data is incorrect for some dates and they're working to fix that. So you can see this little grayed out box. There's an issue with the data there. So that's just great to get an overview, right? If you're tracking your growth month by month, this is maybe something you would want to look at per month. But the most important thing I like from this tab is coming down here and seeing your top videos in this period. This tells you what content you should probably create more of because this is the content people are watching. You see what to say in your first video. How to create an animated YouTube subscribe button. First YouTube video ideas. These are all my top videos. These are also older videos. As you can see. This one's from 2019. I'm filming this video in the beginning of 2021. You can see this is from 2020-2020-2020-2019. Two 2019 videos in my top videos during the last 90 days. And the last 90 days was completely in 2021. And for me, that's pretty scary working on this and my YouTube strategy. If you want me to actually do an entire video on what my YouTube strategy is going to be for 2021. Let me know in the comments type please share your YouTube strategy. So I know that's a video you want to see. The reason why this is scary is because these videos are old and they're going to eventually die out and I don't have any new ones growing my channel. So that tends to be a problem I see a lot when I work with clients is that their YouTube channel was doing great and then they're like all of a sudden it stopped growing. It's usually because one or two older videos had done most of the growth for the channel and now that video is just getting old and it's dying out. And so we have to find a way to course correct. And that's definitely what I'm seeing here on my channel. There's even more data that I can show how this actually looks and I'll share that in a minute. So the next tab that I want to go to is reach. I want to again make sure I'm reaching more people. The more people that I can reach, the more eyes that are seeing my content, the more opportunity they're going to click on it, watch my content and then subscribe. So that's what impressions are. If you hover over here again, you're going to see the problem that the data is unavailable. But it's also going to tell you what impressions mean. How many times your video thought were shown to viewers, including only impressions on YouTube. So you can see my I have over 4.2 million impressions in the last 90 days and those impressions are up 32% from the prior 90 days. That's great. But you also want to look at your click through rates. Now click through rates get a little bit tricky and we'll talk about those in individual videos. But as your impressions increase, your click through rates will decrease because again you're reaching more people that may not know you. They may not be clicking on your video just yet, but you want to continue studying your click through rates to see how you can make them better. And that's where we're going to look at individual videos for that particular data. The next thing that I look at here is specifically traffic source and these three right here. My goal is to get the browse feature to number one when I have clients where we get the browse feature as the number one traffic source. That tends to be where we see a channel take off. That means YouTube has put that channel's videos on. Again, if you click here on browse features, it'll tell you. So the browse features mean homepage, the subscription feed or other browse features. Basically, YouTube is promoting your content. If they put it on the homepage as soon as someone logs in and your click through rate is high because your title and thumbnail gets people to click, you're going to continue to see kind of this snowball success if you can get the browse up to number one. The second thing that I really focus on as well is suggested videos. Again. I want YouTube to think my content is good enough to be put into the suggested side of other people's videos. Again, if my click through rates and my title and thumbnail get people to continue to click, that's going to help me grow my channel as well. And with YouTube search I like to have it in the top three, but I don't like to have it as one or two because YouTube search viewers are a little bit less valuable. With YouTube search viewers you tend to see a smaller watch time from them and they tend not to subscribe. They may be just trying to get a quick answer and bouncing. So I want to make sure I am hitting the home or the browse and also the suggested first. So I like to keep an eye to see how this grows. Now this is in 90 days. I can also look how did I do in February YouTube search External suggested. Was I able to even grow that a little bit more? More in March you can see I got suggested up to number two. All right, so that's things that I like to track here again, browse suggested search my top three. The last thing that I like to look at here as well is this inverted triangle. And this is going to tell you how much YouTube is kind of blessed. Your content you can see here. In March, 32% of my traffic to my channel is coming from YouTube recommending your content. Again, you can hover over any of these and get some more information. So it says YouTube is recommending your content recommended on the watch page or on the home page. And then you can see for the other 60 seconds viewers seeking your content. And it's going to tell you exactly what to do. You can increase the chance of YouTube suggesting your content by increasing your click through rate and your video watch time. There's your answer. Right? So that's one thing that we've been working on. That's why we've been studying the first 24 to 48 hours when our video comes out. What can we do to make our click through rates higher? And we're also studying our audience Retention graphs to get people to watch my video longer. This is really just a quick overview, kind of tip of the iceberg, information on what's growing your channel right now. So you can see when there's excellent external traffic, meaning not YouTube specific. You can see Google is driving a lot of traffic. Pinterest, my website, and then DuckDuckGo is another place driving traffic to my website. You can also see the suggested videos and I'm going to dig into a little bit more about that here in a minute. But the top five suggested videos that are driving me traffic as well. Then you can see the playlists and YouTube search. So remember those top videos that I shared with you that are my top videos? The what to say in your first YouTube video. YouTube video ideas. It's coming from people searching the terms first YouTube video, my first YouTube video, first video on YouTube. Right. So these are the keywords that are driving most of my traffic to those top videos. The next thing I'm going to look at real quick here in engagement that I love. And remember, audience retention is key. Is this key moments for audience retention? You can come in here and you can click by intro, continuous segment spikes or dips. Again, YouTube is giving you every information you need to know to understand this. So if you have a hard time keeping your audience watching at the very beginning of your video, so the first 30 seconds, here are your top three videos that have kept your audience engaged in those 30 seconds. So go back to these videos, watch them right in here in the audience retention area and see how did you keep people watching? All right, and this is just in March. I could pull this out to. Even if we do 90 days, we can see if there were different videos here. We can see this one is a little bit better. But study this. How should you open your videos? Which way do you open your videos that keep people watching? Then you can even skip here to dips and see, okay, why are people dipping? Why are people leaving my video? Watch these dips. Right? Come in here and see what was I saying? What was I doing? Was I talking too much? This is really going to help you increase your audience retention. Then the last thing you can look at spikes as well. Why people came back to your videos. And you can look at continuous segments and see, okay, I was sharing what kind of content? How was I sharing it? Was I using B roll? Did I have text on my screen? If you can really understand what's causing people to watch your videos longer, you're going to increase your watch time. And YouTube is going to push your content to more people here on the audience tab. It can get a little tricky if you don't have enough data. If you don't have enough videos live and people watching your videos, you may not have some this information because YouTube needs a lot of data from your videos to determine this. So one of the great things here is when is your audience watching YouTube content? So you can see for me, very many of your viewers are on YouTube. You can see mostly in the afternoons. That's when my people are watching. They're not watching in the evening, they're not watching in the morning. So I know I should be publishing any type of my video right here around lunchtime my time. I love this. This is a rather new feature here on YouTube. You can see what other channels your audience watches that can help you start to come up with content, ideas, collaboration, ide. Right, so these are the top five. There's three different pages here. So what I would suggest, if you have this data, you can even go to their videos, go to their channel and search their channel by most popular videos and see what kind of content are they creating their audience loves because their audience is watching you too. And maybe you can create some of that content and show up in their suggested videos as well. You can also see other videos your audience wants in the last seven days. This is huge if you think you can talk about any of these or you have your own perspective. Obviously I'm not the only female that talks about YouTube here on YouTube. And so I see Annie did a video. If I had a thousand subscribers, here's what I would do. That's a great video. Obviously I have my own ideas and my own tactics that I could do that video to how I use tubebuddy to get a hundred thousand subscribers. Obviously I'm not at that point, but I do use tubebuddy. So maybe I could tweak that on how I use tubebuddy to save me three hours a week with my YouTube channel. Right. Same with Catherine, my analytics. Exactly one year apart. Maybe that's an idea for me to write down and start doing, give you guys a full report on my analytics and then do it a year later. And there are two different pages here as well to help you see what your audience is watching. And this is so important. If you've been waiting to put content out until it's perfect, you've got to get content on YouTube so you can get this very valuable information. Otherwise you won't be able to perfect and mold your strategy because you can't create a great strategy until you have a lot of this data. Okay. The last step up here is revenue. And I don't really look at YouTube revenue for anything. YouTube revenue is usually just a bonus for me because I focus on driving leads to my business. All right, so we look at very top level of your channel, but I do highly recommend that you dive into it individual videos. Because I do this every single month. I'm usually looking about four videos. Right. I post weekly. All my clients I recommend post weekly as well. And at the end of the month, we dive in not only to the overview here, we dive into each individual video as well to see how we can tweak things to make it better for the next month. So let me show you what we do there. You'll want to go over here into your content tab and then go into. This video has only been out three days. I don't know if I have enough information there just yet, but let me pull up this one. I'm going to go to the analytics. So the first thing you're going to see here is this graphic and this little gray area is where your videos typically perform. My goal in every single video that I plan map out, my goal is to get this blue line above average. Because I know if I'm continuing to go above average, eventually my average will go up and I will need to continue to focus and push myself on creating even better videos to be above average. Then a neat little trick that I learned from Kathryn Manning is to go over here, click on custom, and the current date is April 9th. I just want to click on April 9th again to get a different view of this graph. So if I go over Here, click on April 9th again, hit apply, I can see if I'm getting any new views recently. So all my views came in about. What's this? The first 5 days this video is live and it's kind of died off. But let me show you an example of a video totally different. Remember this video, the what to say in your first YouTube video? My number one video right now. It came out and it did not do much. The first. Let's see, this video was published on November 14th. Kind of just hung out through November through December. Started picking up some steam here in December and then take a look. Obviously that's when we know what happened in 2020. It took off, right? Look at all these views. After it sat there for about two months and had nothing. And then it died down a bit, right? And it picked back up. And so just because a YouTube video had its kind of life. You thought it can pick back up in. This video is a great example. And this is how you can see that, just by going in and tweaking that. Thanks Katherine for sharing that. Okay, again, so back to this video. I'm looking at this. You can also see how many subscribers this video has gained. You can also see where the traffic is coming, the YouTube homepage, which is fantastic where I wanted to get traffic from. And your audience retention pops up here as well. You check out your intro, any dips right here in the overview. The next thing I want to look at here is reach and this is something that we look at. The first two hours the video is live because within two hours we can get a clear idea of what the click through rate was for the first two hours. And we don't send it to our email list until about three hours after this video is published. So I can get some data. What I'm looking at is this click through rate. I want to track when this video comes out and the first day, what was its click through rate? Can I change it? What can I change? Typically we will make a tweak to the thumbnail first, then we may make a tweak to the title and then a third if we need to would be another thumbnail change. But this is really key because remember, if your impressions are increasing, you need to make sure people that see your content click on it. And really studying those click through rates is the way to do it. From here you're going to see your traffic sources again. Browse features is what I wanted and that's why that video is performing above average because. Because it got served to the browse feature. And you can see in the first day we had a 4.1% click through rate. So that definitely helped it kind of pick up a little bit of steam. The second one was channel pages and as you can see here, I'm not even hitting any search right now, but 43% of the traffic coming to this video is because YouTube's recommending it. Now the next thing that I want to make sure is is this video causing a binge watching session, right? Are people watching this video and then watching another video? So the way we can look at that real quick and then come back to react reach is engagement and looking at the end screen click through rates. It is above average on my channel. But again, doing this so often and with so many channels, I tend to see a video take off when the end screen click through rate hits about an 8, 9 or 10%. Because if YouTube knows people are going to click on your video, they're going to watch it to the end and they're going to watch more content. That's when YouTube starts to push it to even more people. So that inverted triangle, that number, the higher you can get YouTube to recommend your content, the more successful that video is to going going to be. So again, let's go back to Reach real quick and you're going to see here where your external traffic source is coming from. This is something we were trying differently on Instagram to see if we could get some traffic from Instagram and apparently it worked. We had the number one traffic source, external traffic sources, Instagram, right now, Gmail is because from my email list, we actually got more of my Instagram followers to check out this video than my email list. So that's pretty cool to see. And I can also see again, traffic from search. Obviously these aren't any of the keywords that I targeted for this video. I actually, I didn't really strategize this video's keywords because I just wanted to get fun with my content again. And so that's why YouTube search isn't really driving too much traffic right now. All right, are you ready for some advanced tactics? If you're ready to really dig into your analytics to take your channel to that next level, let's go back to analytics. And again, the whole key is to know what your goal is. So if we go in here to see more and your goal is to get subscribers, or your goal is views, or that watch time, that 4,000 hours of watch time, you want to come in here and see which videos are doing that for you. So let's say you want to get subscribers, let's go ahead, turn this metric off so you can put it at the front of this column and have all your videos go in sequential order for most subscribers. So we go to subscribers gained. You can see right here, this is driving me the most subscribers. This is driving me the second most subscribers in the last 28 days, right? If I want more subscribers, if that's my YouTube strategy, I really got to create more content around these topics. If your goal is to get watch time right so you can hit that 4,000 hours to get monetized, you'll probably want to go to average view duration. And from here you want to see which of these videos are the longest and create more content around that. So we have three minutes here, five minute, a five minute video, another five minute video. Here's A seven minute video. If I know this is the longest, people are generally watching this video, about seven minutes. That's going to help me get to that 4,000 hours of watch time quicker, right? If people are watching seven minutes of my video. So go in here, watch this, see how I can recreate this type of video. The last thing that I would recommend is impression click through rates, right? But there's a little trick here because not all impression click through rates are created equally. Go in here and look at impression click through rates. Remember, I want to pull it at the front. We can see this is obviously my channel trailer. So that's the biggest one. How to collaborate with others. This is a video from 2016, has a 9% click through rate. Another 8%. 8%. 8%. So these are the types of videos or thumbnails that people actually clicked on the thumbnail and the title. But the next thing you can do to really drive into how to increase your browse feature, click through rate. Remember, if you can get on the browse page and get more people clicking on the browse page, that's where that snowball happens. So you'll want to come up here to traffic source and you want to look over here at your click through rates right? YouTube search. On average I'm at a 4.7% browse features, I'm at a 3.2. Suggested I'm at a 2.6. Then I would want to do the same thing in each video to determine which thumbnail and title has a higher click through rate on the browse page on the search. So again, real quick, if we go back here, we look at a particular video, let's go to this one. We go to see more traffic source. Make sure we have it clicked up here. Since upload lifetime we can see the browse feature had a 3.5% where suggested had a 1.6. Okay, I know this particular thumbnail is not doing well on suggested, so maybe I tweak it. And yes, you will tweak it for all of the traffic sources. But your evergreen tactics should be in that suggested and in that search, right? Browse features are kind of right when that video comes out because YouTube likes to push new content to the browse feature first. Then your long term strategy should be looking at your suggested video click through rate and your YouTube search click through rate, which is doing pretty well. So those are some advanced tactics you can look at to really grow your YouTube channel. Okay. If you feel like you want more time to dig into your analytics and you're like, okay, how can I find the time? I highly recommend watching the video that's on your screen right now because it's gonna walk you through how I plan all my YouTube videos so I'm not spending so much time recording and editing it. And if you found this video incredibly valuable, make sure you subscribe, hit the like button, and share your biggest takeaway down in the comments. You might just see it over on my Instagram account.