What is YouTube Analytics. "YouTube Analytics" section in the classic version of the Creative Studio Analysis of YouTube Analytics from A to Z. The key to the success of your YouTube channel

How do you know if viewers like your videos? Study YouTube Analytics reports and you will always know the strengths and weaknesses of your channel.

How do you know how effective your channel is? Check reports in YouTube Analytics. They will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, understand viewers’ attitudes towards new content, and analyze viewing dynamics. You'll learn how viewers find and react to your videos, what they like, and which videos they watch longer.

Step 1: Understanding the Audience

Armed with this knowledge, you can optimize your videos so they appear more often in search results. In particular, it will be possible to select more appropriate names, descriptions and icons. Gradually you will be able to expand your audience and increase the number of views. The right keywords will get your content to the top of search results, and YouTube Analytics will help you measure the effectiveness of your metadata. So how do viewers find your videos?

If a video is usually watched to the end, it will appear more often on the first page of search results and in the list of related videos. Try to determine what kind of content your viewers prefer and what holds their attention best. When you work on new material, take this information into account.

Step 3. Increase viewing time

It is important not only to attract viewers to the channel, but also to make them watch more of your videos. Analyze your strategies and keep only those that best help you grow your audience, increase video watch time, and improve other channel performance indicators.

Step 4. Effectiveness of attracting subscribers

To understand how best to work on content, you need to analyze your audience. What do your regular viewers like? How many subscribers do you have? Where do they come from? How do casual viewers become devoted fans? Where do they come from? Maintain regular channel subscribers, and the number of your loyal fans will constantly grow.

Hi all!

My name is Zhenya Zaremba. A couple of months ago I wrote an article about promoting videos on YouTube. Then I received a lot of questions and as a result I decided to write an extended guide on video analytics.

In this article we will talk about YouTube Analytics, the benefits of integration with Google Analytics, as well as the additional data that can be obtained by properly configuring Google Tag Manager.


YouTube is the third most visited website in the world. However, recently more and more people are using it as a search engine. It is now the world's second largest search engine. In some niche niches, organic traffic is growing up to 70% per year. And this is not surprising, because video content is more informative than text content.

Therefore, competition is growing quite quickly. Nowadays, promoting a channel without creating a marketing plan and working closely with analytics is much more difficult than it was a couple of years ago.

In this article we will talk specifically about using analytics:
What can you analyze in YouTube Analytics and what can't?
Why do you need integration with Google Analytics?
What additional data can we track by properly configuring Google Tag Manager?
How can additional analytics add-ons increase behavioral factors and help SEO?

YouTube Analytics

YouTube Analytics is the most important video analysis tool. Its purpose is to track the performance of individual videos and the channel as a whole. It contains a huge layer of data (traffic sources, viewing devices, demographics, etc.), the analysis of which is not difficult. Below I will share with you some features that you need to pay attention to when analyzing statistics, as well as tricks to improve the performance of any video.

Audience retention

The video should not have sharp drops in absolute retention of more than 30% within 15-25 seconds (especially in the first 15 seconds). If you see graphs like the one below in your statistics, definitely change the start. Perhaps the video logo is too long, or something is annoying users. Or maybe the thumbnail is simply irrelevant and misleading. If the audience retention chart contains such sharp dips, we need to look into it.

Carefully analyze sharp increases or decreases in retention at certain points in the video (more clearly seen in the graph below). A sharp increase usually means that the material is interesting and appealing to the audience. But remember that this is not always the case. Perhaps, on the contrary, there is not enough information in this place or there is an error that is being quoted.

There are often moments in videos where people fall off, but it’s impossible not to use them. In such cases, put an annotation in front of them with information that something interesting or useful will be coming soon. Some people won’t leave; retention will improve a little.

Subscribers

Quite an important metric that directly and indirectly affects a lot. There is a direct impact - the number of subscribers is one of the ranking factors (according to my observations, it is already quite insignificant). There is an indirect effect - when people see a channel with a large number of subscribers, they tend to be more loyal to it. Such an audience slightly increases retention, likes more often, and has a higher chance of turning into subscribers.

Select the best videos that bring the most subscribers, add annotations and cards inviting you to subscribe - the return will be even higher.

Important: do not forget to add the ending?sub_confirmation=1 to the channel in annotations and cards (for example, for tanks: https://www.youtube.com/user/WorldOfTanks?sub_confirmation=1). This link will redirect to the subscription window - the conversion will increase.

Likes, comments, dislikes, shares

Now these indicators are not as important as they were a couple of years ago, but they still cannot be ignored. In addition, they have an indirect influence - you yourself are unlikely to watch a long video on a supposedly interesting topic, but with a bunch of dislikes.

Traffic Sources

When the first traffic appears on a channel, it is very important to understand where it is coming from and what external and internal channels are working. I consider this metric important for increasing traffic, since it shows which of your videos are readily embedded by other sites, which are well promoted by keywords, which are more likely to appear on the main page, which are viral, etc.

You can learn more about the main indicators from my articles.

YouTube + Google Tag Manager

With the development of Google Tag Manager, we can easily track user interaction with video content on the site. Video view statistics on the resource will look like this:

Why and to whom can this be useful?
Many bloggers and website owners embed videos into posts to increase behavioral factors. People watch videos and thus spend more time on the site. Properly configured GTM helps you understand what type of video people watch to the end. This allows you to increase the time spent on the site.
For services, online stores or landing pages, GTM allows you to more effectively collect remarketing lists. People who watch the video are more likely to buy the product (or take another desired action).
Website owners who make their own videos can use GTM to better understand their audience.

How to set up Google Tag Manager?

In fact, setup should not take more than 10 minutes. Useful instructions for advanced users can be found in the English-language blog Optimizesmart.com
In this guide below I have described everything in more detail so that even those who have not worked with GTM will understand how to install and configure everything.

Important 1: We will track all videos that are embedded on the site via iframe (the standard way to embed videos on a site).

Important 2: All screenshots were made from the latest version of GTM 2.0 (current at the time of writing).

1) Register/log in to GTM: tagmanager.google.com, place the code on the site, add a new tag to connect to your Google Analytics account (if this has not already been done).

2) Create the YouTube is present variable. The variable is native JavaScript code. Paste the code given below. It checks if there is a video on the page.
1 // Return "true" if there is at least one Youtube video on the page
2 function() (
3 for (var e = document.getElementsByTagName("iframe"), x = e.length; x--;)
4 if (/youtube.com\/embed/.test(e[x].src)) return true;
5 return false;
6 }

3) Create a “YouTube present” trigger. Event selection – page view, trigger type “DOM ready”. The activation condition is that the previously created variable “Youtube is present” is equal to “true”.

The trigger will also fire if a video is present on the page.

4) Now you need to create a tag and insert the script itself, which will track the percentage of video views and send information to Google Analytics, as well as conveniently display titles.
The script itself is located at this link.
Create a “Youtube Listener” tag, select a custom “HTML” tag and paste the script code.

The activation condition is the previously created “YouTube present” trigger.

5) In order to transmit all the information, you need to create 3 more variables: Event Action, Event Category, Event Label. Type is a data level variable.
In the “Name of data level variable” field, enter “eventAction”, “eventCategory”, “eventLabel” respectively. The data layer version is Version 2.



You also need to create a custom trigger to send all the data to Google Analytics. Event selection – custom event. In the activation condition, write “YouTube” in the event name.

6) In order to collect all the data and send it to Google Analytics, create another tag “UA YouTube Event”. Product selection – Google Analytics, tag type selection – Universal Analytics.

Now about the tag settings. We put our Universal Analytics identifier in the identifier, and the tracking type is Event. For the category, select – Event Category, for the action – Event Action, for the label – Event Label. Activation condition – Youtube Event (trigger created in the fifth step).

In general, the picture should look like this:

This tag will send all interactions from the YouTube video to Google Analytics.

7) To check your work, click on the arrow next to “Publish” in the upper right corner and then select “Preview and Debug”.

Now go to the website page where the YouTube video is inserted, click on play and then stop. All 3 tags should be activated.

If everything is activated, then return to Google TM and click “Publish”.
After that, you can play the video yourself and stop it. All data should appear in the “Events” section of GA in the “Real Time” tab.

If suddenly problems arise somewhere, or something doesn’t work, write in the comments, I’ll be happy to help.

YouTube Analytics + Google Analytics

YouTube analytics provides a wealth of information for video analysis. But if you want to analyze the channel specifically, then integration with GA will help you get additional information.

To link two analytics, follow the instructions:
1) Create a new property for your YouTube channel in Google Analytics and copy the tracking ID.

GA will have statistics for this URL and for all categories and feeds containing this URL (for example, www.youtube.com/user/WorldOfTanks/videos , www.youtube.com/user/WorldOfTanks/playlists etc.). There will also be information on the main page of the channel, if you do not use a simple and memorable URL in the settings (for us this is www.youtube.com/channel/UCVnah-S-sByndtg9cHBxlOA), and on all derivatives with it.

But there will be no information about the video URLs. If you click to watch a video from the main page, in a playlist, or somewhere else, GA will not record this.

Now that we have understood the principle of connection between GA and YouTube, let's see what additional information we can receive:

Evaluation of advertising campaigns. Integration is required if you purchase advertising on the main page of your YouTube channel. YouTube Analytics does not allow you to measure its effectiveness. But in GA you can see how much time people spent on the site from that ad source, their bounce rate, etc.
Conversion tracking and analysis. Many people know that if you add ?sub_confirmation=1 to the channel URL, you will be taken straight to the subscription page. For example, for us it is: www.youtube.com/user/WorldOfTanks?sub_confirmation=1
GA shows the number of clicks on this URL. By correlating this data with the number of subscribers in YouTube analytics, you can understand the behavior of your users. If your subscriber to click ratio is quite low, then something is causing them to not subscribe. Perhaps you should ask in the annotation to log in to your email. Perhaps you should write that it is free. Everything is different for each channel.
Statistics for specific pages. GA shows the number of clicks to each page. For example, you can measure the conversion of sending emails to your email from the “About the channel” page. If you sell advertising and your Channels page gets a lot of hits, you can estimate your cost per conversion.

Often, competent work with analytics can be much more profitable than spending your budget on attracting traffic. If you have any questions or comments, ask - I will be happy to answer everything!

P.S. Recently, my colleagues and I launched the World of Video project. In this blog we share professional secrets and look at interesting cases from other companies. If you want to know everything about video marketing and promotion on YouTube, join us!

YouTube Analytics contains graphs and reports that help you track the performance of your videos and the channel as a whole. There is a huge amount of data contained in various reports (e.g. Watch Time, Traffic Sources, Demographics).

Where is the "YouTube Analytics" section located?

To open YouTube Analytics reports, go to this link or do the following:

View data in YouTube Analytics

Below you'll find basic information about how to view and understand the different types of data in YouTube Analytics reports.

On the computer

Data filtering

Many reports have filters at the top to make it easier to find the information you need. Data can be filtered by:

  • content;
  • device type;
  • location;
  • time range;
  • content type ("Video" or "Playlists");
  • user status;
  • type of playback (broadcast or video on demand), if possible;
  • YouTube product (if possible);
  • content language.
Line chart Multiple Line Chart

Using a diagram of several lines, you can study the dynamics of views of videos and channels, as well as find out which regions viewers watch your channel more often than others. You can compare up to 25 indicators at the same time.

By default, the top five positions are selected, represented by lines of different colors. However, you can choose to view any content that interests you.

In addition, the selected items can be compared with the total value. To do this, check the box Summary data in the upper right corner.

Note. It is impossible to add other indicators in such a chart.

Combined histogram

An area chart (combo bar chart) shows how selected data relates to total values. This makes it easy to compare performance and identify trends.

By default, the histogram displays the five metrics with the highest values. You can compare up to 25 indicators at the same time.

Pie chart

You can display up to 25 indicators on a pie chart. Hover your cursor over a sector to see what it corresponds to.

Note. In this chart, you cannot look at the time dynamics and compare a single indicator with the final data. To do this, use a multi-line chart or a combined histogram.

Histogram

In a histogram, data is presented in the form of horizontal bars, the length of which is proportional to the value of the indicator. You can't see the time dynamics on this chart. To do this, use a line chart.

Note. This chart also cannot compare an individual metric to a total.