Trena walks through five YouTube analytics that matter: click through rate, audience retention, end screen click rates, traffic sources, and YouTube recommendations. These metrics show you what's working and where to focus to grow your channel.
Are you looking at your YouTube analytics? This could be a reason why your YouTube channel isn't growing. Hi and welcome back. If you are new here, my name is Trena and on this channel I help you do YouTube better. So if you want to continue to learn how to do YouTube better with new videos every Monday and Wednesday, make sure you click that subscribe button. Today, I want to talk about YouTube analytics. We all know they're there, but what are we actually looking at and what do we need to really be tracking? I know you probably don't have a lot of time to be digging into these analytics, so I want to streamline this for you and give you the five analytics you need to be tracking that's going to help you grow your YouTube channel faster. So if you've never looked at your analytics before, you're going to go into your YouTube account here and you're going to go down to analytics. Now, in the new Studio beta option, things look a little prettier and I am learning more and more about beta, although I have my favorite things that I do in the classic model. We're going to walk through the beta since this is where YouTube is moving towards. The first thing I want you to look at is your click through rate. Now, if you're in the dashboard, you're going to see an average click through rate across all of your videos. But what I want you to do is go in and analyze Potentially the last 10 videos that you had. I want you to look at the click through rates and see are the click through rates getting better? Are they getting worse or are they staying the same? What this number is going to tell you is your thumbnail and title is either enticing people to click or not enticing people to click. So if your number is getting worse, it means if you change something with your title or your thumbnail, stop doing that and go back to what you were doing before. Or if you see a consistent number, say 2%, 3% on every single video, it's time to give your thumbnails and your titles a makeover again. To grow a YouTube channel, you need to get people to watch your videos. And if your click through rate isn't getting better, then nobody is going to click on your videos and watch them. Now, there's no specific number you're shooting for. What I want you to shoot for is to continually increase those click through rates every single video. I tend to go back into my analytics and look a week after my video has been published and kind of track that number and kind of take that number and put it into a spreadsheet. After a week, I like to just say, okay, that's the data for that video and I'm going to save that. I'm going to see what the next video's click through rate is for that week. So that's the first analytic you should really be looking at. The second one is audience retention. Now, you've heard me talk about audience retention a lot on this channel because it is so important. Audience retention is going to let you know if your audience actually likes your videos and if your video content is good. Now, we may be biased and think our content is amazing, but this number, this audience retention graph is actually going to show us what other people think of our content. So what you want to do is go into that video again, I would do this about a week after that video is live so you can get a good amount of data on it. You're looking for when people are leaving your video. What are you doing when people leave? What can you do better? Your goal is to get 50% of people watching your video to the end or to when the end screens come up, which is the last 20 seconds. This is really an important statistic for you to be looking at and tracking so that you can make better videos to get more people to watch longer. Because then YouTube's going to start recommending more of your content if you can prove to YouTube you have good content. The third analytic I want you to look at is click through rates for your end screens. Now, we all know YouTube wants people to stay on YouTube and watch more content. And you want people to watch more of your videos to get more views and watch time on your channel. So, so once you focus on increasing your audience retention and getting more people to those end screens, you really want to focus on getting more people to click that end screen. So I want you to track how many people are clicking that end screen and what can you do to make it better? Do you maybe need to put a specific video there to increase your click through rate? Maybe you just need to put the best for viewer or maybe you need to put a playlist. Start testing to see which one of these gets you a higher click through rate, which means more views and potentially YouTube suggesting more of your content. The fourth piece is your traffic sources. So you're going to want to go into your traffic sources and start to see what's really driving traffic to your channel. Your goal is to get suggested videos or browse features to the top one or two spot. When you see this happening, that means YouTube is suggesting your content, which is a good thing. So more and more people are going to see your videos. You can watch my video from last week where I talk about how to get into that suggested video area. But what I want you to look at here is what can you do or what do you need to work on to get browse features and suggested videos up to the top. You can also take a look at your external traffic sources to really determine if there's a social media platform you need to be focusing on. For me, when I got started on YouTube, Pinterest was a huge external traffic source for me. So instead of wasting my time on other platforms, I focus a lot on Pinterest and it ended up driving a lot of traffic to my channel, which when it was brand new, before YouTube started recommending my content, I actually was using another platform to drive traffic to help me boost my views and get me recognized by the YouTube algorithm. Now the next piece of data I want you to look at is on your dashboard. You can also look at this as well. For each video you want to look at the percentage of YouTube recommended, it's this little funnel, upside down triangle thing and your goal is to increase that percentage. Again, the more YouTube recommends your content, the more you're going to get in front of more people. You need to be creating good content. So studying that audience retention graph, you need to have good click through rate. So improving that click through rate for YouTube to want to start putting you out in front of more people. Again, I like to track this per month. You could also track it per video to see if there was one particular video that did really well that YouTube is suggesting more. What did you do on that video? Study that video and recreate it for your next videos. If you want to continue to learn how to do YouTube better, make sure you click that video that is on your screen right now and subscribe to this channel because I'm helping you do YouTube better with new videos every Monday and Wednesday. See you in the next video. Bye.
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