The Best YOUTUBE ANALYTICS to GROW Your Small YouTube Channel!

These are not going to be the typical YouTube metrics that you hear most YouTube gurus talk about. Because if you are a business owner looking to use YouTube to drive more sales to your course or book more clients, you are looking to attract quality viewers and not quantity of viewers. You want to attract the people that will buy from you or say yes to working with you. You know that getting those people to your channel is way more important than trying to get masses of people to your channel aren't going to take action working or buying from you. And I can't tell you how many times I've gotten comments on my videos saying, who are you to tell me about YouTube? Why are you a YouTube strategist? You hardly have 50,000 subscribers. Why should I listen to you? Well, hear me, you aren't the person that should be watching my video right now, so move on. Because I'm trying to attract viewers that want to use YouTube for business. They want to use YouTube as a lead source and a marketing tactic, not to be an influencer to get the most views and subscribers. Because I hate to break it to you, but with over 50,000 subscribers, I make over half a million dollars in my business without running a massive ad strategy either. The majority of that half a million dollars in revenue has come from my 50,000 subscriber channel. So if that's what you are looking to do and you want to do, keep watching. Because I'm going to share with you the 10 metrics you should be tracking on your YouTube to ensure it's growing and attracting the right people. And if that's not you, bye. Go troll somewhere else. Go ahead and hit that like button if you're into the poof, be gone troll vibes that I'm putting out. All right, that first metric you need to be tracking pretty much every week with a new video that you're posting is your click through rate. Your click through rate tells you how well your title and your thumbnail did at getting people to click on your video. Now I have a couple videos here on my channel that go into more details on how you should create thumbnails. So I'm going a link to that video right here that you can watch after this one. But the key to getting a better click through rate on your video is actually determining what the title and the thumbnail for your video is going to be before you even craft the content for that video. Because if you can't come up with a good thumbnail title combo that you think people are going to click on you May want to rethink the content of that video to make it more click worthy. And I will share one of my major pet peeves about thumbnail. So please do not do this anymore. If you are, you cannot just put the title of your video as text on your thumbnail. Your thumbnail and your title need to tell a story together and just putting the title of the video on the text on the thumbnail does nothing for you. The other thing I want to mention here is you need to get out of graphic designer mode because graphics for YouTube are different than typical graphic designer rules like Pinterest or Instagram or website concepts. You need to think about the style of your thumbnail in relation to what is the style of thumbnail that is happening in your niche on YouTube. And then you're going to need to adapt your brand standards, your brand colors, all of that to a thumbnail style that's working on YouTube.

Just making sure you know where your click through rate is.

You're actually going to go to your.

Individual video here in Content and then you're going to click on analytics and you're going to go up to your Reach tab right here and that's your impression click through rate.

Now you could get a little bit.

More detailed and click on this and see how it goes up or down for each day. But this is the number you're looking at.

All right. I would love for you to share in the comments what your last video is. Click through rate. And there is no shame because I've had the gamut of click through rates. I've had 1% click through rates. I've had up to 8% click through rates. But I'm just wondering what we're working with here with those that are watching. To share your latest videos, click the rate below. The next metric you need to be tracking each week is impressions. This is how many eyeballs are getting on your title and thumbnail. This could be on the homepage, this could be on search, this could be on suggested. But, but the reason why this is really important to track is because you want to see if your impressions are increasing each week. And remember we talked about click through rate. If your impressions are higher on a video than what you normally get, let's say you typically get a thousand impressions in the first 24 hours on your thumbnail and you generally get a 3% click through rate. And then you publish a video the next week and you have let's say 3,000 impressions. But now your click through rate is down to 2%. That is okay, because you're getting more impressions, more people are being shown your video, people who aren't aware of your content yet, people who are new to your content. So when your impressions increase, you can expect your click through rate to go down. And I share this with you, so you keep that in mind and don't panic that your click through rate went down. Because if your impressions went up, that's okay. Now, at the end of this video, I'm going to share with you a super easy way in your YouTube analytics to compare metrics over time. So if you want to compare your metrics from last week to this week, or last month to this week, I'm going to show you how to do that. And impressions are one of the things that you should look at this way because if it's continuing to increase, this means you are feeding the algorithm the information it needs to continue to find the right people. And you are proving to YouTube that you're making YouTube happy and it's going to continue promoting your videos to more people for free. Let me quickly show you where you can find your impressions number.

So we're still on this specific video that I showed you, the click through rate. You can check out its impressions. So you can come here to impressions. You can actually do it in the first 24 hours as well to see how many impressions you had in the first 24 hours. You can also go to your channel as a whole. So if we go to analytics, and this is in the last 28 days, if you come to content, you're going to see impressions for the last 28 days. And you can see I have over 145,000 impressions, which is an increase of 46% from the last 28 days.

This next metric is critical and making sure your videos reach more people and your channel grows. And it's usually one of the metrics not many people look at and that's your audience retention for each video. Most of the time when I get clients and they ask why is my channel not growing? I keep posting and it's not growing. When I look at their audience retention, only about 20, maybe only 10% of people get past that first minute in their video. So I instantly see that their audience retention tanks in the first 30 to 60 seconds. That tells me that YouTube is not putting their video in front of people because it's not a quality video in the algorithm's eyes. Because YouTube will push content that people watch longer. Because the longer people watch your video, the more ads YouTube can show and the more money YouTube makes. So if you can't get people to watch past one minute, that's not going to be valuable for YouTube. Now let me show you where to go in and find your audience retention and how to read these graphs. Honestly, I highly encourage you to analyze audience retention on every single video, at least monthly, if not at least before you film your next batch of videos so you can learn what didn't keep people's attention. So you don't do that in your next round of videos.

So I'm still in here where impressions were. And this is a great place to look at audience retention because here under content, you're going to be able to see your above typical intros, meaning the.

Intros of your videos that kept people.

Watching longer and also the below typical intros as well. But when you want to look at a particular video's audience retention again, you're going to come back to content and pull out the video you're looking at and go to its analytics. There are two places you can read this right here at Overview. And what's going to happen is you're going to get a gray line as to where your average audience retention is. This video in the first 30 seconds you can see kept about 57% of people watching. This is average for me. I would like to get that higher. But again, this is average for me. What I would then pay attention to is this drop right here. I would, before I shoot my next videos, watch what I did here. Can I figure out why people left my video there? Is it something I said? Is it something that I did?

Did I leave my screen share up.

Too long and then I would adjust that for my future videos. Same thing with this drop right here. Is it something I said? Is it something I did? But what you want to make sure is you have people getting past that first 30 seconds. The ideal goal would be to get anywhere between 30% to 40% to the end of your video. That would be what I would shoot for.

Like, you can see I'm not there on this video.

Some videos I do hit that, some videos I don't. So don't. Just something to keep in mind.

The next metric is average watch time. Just like with audience retention, the longer you can get people watching YouTube, the more ads YouTube can show, the more valuable your content becomes to YouTube, the more YouTube will do the legwork for you and promote your content to more people. This is why the main strategy I teach all of my clients is how to build a series of videos that easily get their viewers to watch a video after video after video, binging on their content increases that channel watch time. Now, this is where the conversation tends to go. Well, how long should my YouTube videos be? Trina, since you now know where to look for your audience retention, let's say on average you're getting people to watch about 30% of your video. If that video is five minutes long, you're only accumulating about a minute and a half of watch time. If that video is 10 minutes long, long. Now, you're accumulating about three minutes of average watch time. Now, I'm not saying you need to make your videos longer to accumulate more watch time. I'm saying you need to make sure, especially if you are creating educational content to prove your authority to build trust with your audience, you need to create highly valuable videos. You don't need to stuff it with filler and fluff. You need to make sure the content of that video delivers on the title and the thumbnail, the basic prompt promise that they clicked on when they came to your video. I honestly have no idea how long my video is going to be until I finish filming it. I take the title of my video, then I write my content for my video. And however long that is to ensure I deliver on that title is how long my video actually is.

I did want to show you an example here. So this is the last video that I was showing you, and about 29% of my video was viewed, but that was an average view duration of over five minutes. So if this video was only five minutes long, 30% viewed would be a lot less. So again, keeping that in mind and figuring out how long your video needs to be, realistically, the next metric you.

Should be looking at is your suggested traffic sources. This metric or this data is going to tell you what videos out on YouTube are actually suggesting viewers to your content. And this is going to be an indicator as to whether you're categorized on the algorithm or right or not. Or does YouTube have enough information to understand where you should be categorized and who the right person is to watch your videos? The sooner YouTube can figure out that person and where to fit you in the algorithm, the sooner you'll be getting those quality viewers to your videos. Let me show you where you can find this metric.

Now, you can find suggested traffic for each individual video or your channel as a whole. So let's go look at your channel as a whole. We want to back out here and go to our analytics. And then you're going to click this, see more, and then you're going to come up here to Traffic Source. We do have the last 28 days selected. So if you scroll down, let me move my face over and click on suggested videos right here. You're going to be able to see the videos that are suggesting new traffic. So this is a video of mine and it brought in 92 additional views. This video brought in 51 additional views. Now if we go to this particular video, I can do the same thing. I'm going to click on See more. I'm going to click on Traffic Source.

So we're going to go up here.

And we're going to click on since published. YouTube's tricky. So you're going to come up here and click on since uploaded. Then you can click on suggested videos and you can see this video is suggesting this video and what you're looking for or any other channel. So I'm not sure what this channel is. I would need to look at it. Does it connect to my channel? Is my audience watching that channel? Same thing with this particular channel, mine. Now that is somebody who I know. This is Alex. I can't think of her last name right now. She speaks to content or copywriter freelancers. So that's a good match. I'm not sure of that channel yet. And so you're just going to go through here and make sure that the videos that are suggesting your videos are aligned with the audience that you want watching your content.

The next metric you want to look at is watch time from subscribers versus non subscribers. A big problem I see with so many business owners that I work with in my coaching program is they create a lot of how to content. They do their keyword research and they see this is a really highly searched question and I'm going to do it and I'm going to get more people to my video and more people will want to buy from me because they find my video because I created this how to video. While these videos may get more views, most of the time these beginner how to videos that tend to have higher search volume don't turn into buyers or sales. Now I talk about the importance of understanding the difference between beginner viewers and ready to buy viewers. Viewers in my workshop, profit per view, it's just 37 to grab a seat and I walk through exactly how to build a YouTube strategy specifically for people who are ready to buy and the difference between creating videos that are how to videos and creating videos that you're ready to buy. Audience will search, find and then buy from you. If you're interested in Learning that strategy, go to trina little.com forward/ppv to grab your seat in the next live workshop of profit per view. Because what happens if you're creating content for beginner viewers is they're going to come to get their question answered and they're going to bounce. They aren't invested in learning more from you, they aren't ready to commit in buying from you. They're just coming to get the answer and they're leaving. And then what tends to happen is you build a YouTube channel based around non subscribers or what I've heard called a utility channel. People who just come to learn the answer to a question and then bounce. This is is not what you want to do when you are a business owner on YouTube. Let me show you where you can find that.

So to find this you are going to go into your audience, you're going to scroll down here and look at watch time from subscribers. You can see I have about a 30, 70% split, meaning 30% of people.

Who are watching my videos are subscribed.

That's a pretty decent rate. Ideally I would like to see maybe a 40, 60%. I want to make sure I'm getting these non subscribers into because becoming subscribers now. If you would look at my YouTube channel from 2021, this would have been a lot higher. Almost a 90% of my watch time was coming from non subscribers, meaning I wasn't doing a good job of getting people to subscribe to my channel. They were coming, watching the content and bouncing. So I want you to really look at this and see if you can see trends in more views coming from your subscribers and not so many views coming from non subscribers.

The next metric I want you to look at you may not have because you need to have enough views on your video every single month for YouTube to pull this data. And this is channels your audience watches. This is a huge key indicator as to whether YouTube really understands who you're trying to target with your content or not. So let me show you where to find that.

So we are still here in the audience tab. And again you need to ensure you have enough views to get this. And here are the channels your audience watches. I want to make sure these channels are the right people, not meaning the person, but the audience they are attracting. And I know all of these are pretty on par. Obviously Nick is a little bit more YouTuber content so that's not directly always aligned with my audience. But I do talk a lot about YouTube so that makes sense. And click over here and see creator Booth again, they talk about creating content, video content. So this is pretty aligned. It didn't always used to be like this. It took me a while to get this back to these channels. Then the other thing you can do again, if you have enough views on your channel. I don't always have this data because I don't always have enough views. I can see what my audience is actually watching. Again, making sure that these videos my audience would be watching so that I know that YouTube better understands who I'm trying to attract as well.

The next metric you need to be looking at, at least on a monthly basis, if not weekly basis, is YouTube search. You're noticing a lot of these metrics that I'm sharing with you is how YouTube is trying to understand who is the best person for you. So when you look at the data around YouTube search, you're seeing what search terms people are typing into YouTube and then watching your videos. If you look at the search terms during this process and you're like, oh yeah, those search terms totally relate to what I'm talking about, then you're good. But you may have some, and I've seen this with some clients before, some really random search terms that's just gonna tell me that YouTube doesn't yet understand who you are targeting yet. And we need to get more specific with our video content and our strategy to course correct and get categorized right in the algorithm. This was a huge indicator to me back in March of 2023 that my channel is miscategorized. So what I had to actually do because a lot of my search terms that were driving me traffic were very basic beginner topics about YouTube. And that's not who I'm trying to attract. I'm trying to attract business, business owners, many of you here that know they want to use YouTube in their business. And so what I had to actually do was delete over 12 videos on my channel that were causing me to be classified in the algorithm wrong, which had almost a million views. I did that in October of 2023. And here in January, as I'm recording this video, I just about have myself recategorized in the algorithm where I need it to be. Here's where you can check this data.

I. I hope those of you that have a YouTube channel are actually pulling up and doing this with me. The way we're going to find this is we're going to go to your content tab and you're going to come down here to the bottom. What you can do finding it here is just click YouTube search and you're going to see the top five phrases that are driving you traffic. So the portion of your traffic 2.7% of my traffic is coming from the word social media calendar, which relates, which connects. Now if I click click see more and I look at the other words, I can see my name is driving traffic. What I had a problem with that I'm trying to get away from Specifically, what should your first YouTube video be about? What should my first YouTube video be? Before I deleted 12 videos and over almost a million views, these were my number one search terms driving me traffic. And that wasn't what my ideal viewer was searching. So now we can see it's much more aligned with business owners. We're talking about content marketing, social media content calendar. And so this is again going to give you an idea if the algorithm understands who should be your audience.

Okay, fun game here. I would love for you to share in the comments. What are some of the main search terms that are driving you traffic to your channel right now? And it's totally okay if it's super random. Trust me. I've seen some really weird, risque and random search terms on clients. So I'm just curious, what are the top two search terms driving you traffic share below. The next metric you definitely want to be checking each week is your end screen click through rate. Remember how I mentioned earlier in this video that you want to ensure you're increasing your watch time over overall on your channel and you want to make sure you're getting people to watch video after video after video because that makes you more valuable in YouTube. So for example, let's say you put out video A and they Click on video a 3% of the time, they watch about 50% of that video on average. But then your end screen click, the rate is about a 10%. What this tells the algorithm is people are clicking on this video, over half of people are watching this video and then they are watching another video. So YouTube is going to take video A and recommend it to more people. YouTube is going to promote it for you for free because YouTube knows that video gets people to click on it, gets people to watch and gets people to a second video because you strategically set up in your end screen what video they should watch next. This is why my entire YouTube strategy that I teach my clients is based on 4 to 5 video playlists that easily set up video 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5. And your end screen click through rate is going to tell you how well your playlist is actually working. And are people clicking to that next video now?

End screen click through rate. You're going to look at for each.

Video we're going to go back to.

The content tab here, we're going to pull up the analytics and then you're going to want to go to the engagement tab. On this tab you're going to scroll here and see your end screen element, click rate. And I see this particular video had a 5.7% click through rate and my channel average is 4. This is good news for me. I know this is doing a good job of getting people from this video to the next next video in my series.

That's what I want to happen.

I want people to binge watch my channel and this is that metric. I could go back and look at the video prior to this. So if we went here, this video is actually recommending this video. So if we go here, we look at engagement, we see 3.8% click through rate. Not as good of a click through rate. What I could do then is listen to how I pitched this video and figure out what did I say I differently or how did I pitch the video differently in this video compared to the last one I showed you because I had a 5.7% click through rate. Maybe I made the next video sound a lot better in the last video. Why I had a 5.7% click through rate or maybe this one I just didn't do clear enough job of getting them to click the next video with an enticing call to action. So this is something you want to be looking at to ensure you're creating binge sessions on your channel.

All right, I promised. I'm going to show you how to compare your metrics month to month or even week to week. This is a super easy way to get a quick glance on how things went last month compared to this month or last week compared to this week.

Here's the fun part. You can go into see more. All right, now determine what is the time period you want to look at right now I'm going to compare the last 28 days prior to the previous 28 days. So I'm going to come up here to compare to. I'm going to do period over period and I'm going to let me make my face a little bit smaller here. We can see that what we're looking at right now is view from the blue bar is December 30th to the 26th currently and the purple bar is the previous 28 days. So I can see that the last 28 days are actually increasing views. I had 13,000 views in the last 28 days compared to 9,000 views in the previous 28 days. I can also come up here to views by and I can go to subscribers and see how many subscribers I grew now. The last 28 days I grew 82 subscribers. The prior 28 days was 51 subscribers. I also mentioned about impressions that could come here. Click on impressions a lot more. Right? 146,000 impressions in the last 28 days as opposed to 100,000 in the previous 28 days. Now, I wasn't creating as much content in December, so it may be more advantageous for me to go ahead and cancel comparison. Pull up the last seven days compare to period over period. The blue bar is the last seven days and the purple bar is the seven days days prior to. So it's pretty close to the same. We can see impressions are a little bit higher this current week, which is great. It means my strategy seems to be working this month. We can also look at subscribers in the last seven days. Alright, so we obviously got more subscribers in the previous seven days. I did have a video go semi viral, so that's telling me subscriber rate is down a little bit this week. I can also look at at impressions and I do see impressions are increasing. So this could be an opportunity for me to turn some of those new viewers into potential subscribers in my next video or so. Again, this is an easy way to start tracking things time over time.

I know that is a lot of metrics to think about, but in my next video on your screen right now, I'm going to share how I set goals for these metrics and a spreadsheet tracker template to help you keep track of everything in a nice, nice neat place. Click here to watch now or subscribe now if it's not out yet.