Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
When looking at raw data for the first time, it can be extremely overwhelming. On YouTube Studio, there are so many different metrics, reports, and time frames to choose from and knowing how to understand which data to pick to tell a story is extremely difficult. In this article, we’ll discuss several key reports in YouTube Studio and what they can tell you about your content, how it’s performing and how you can improve it.
Channel Performance
Channel Performance is one of the most fundamental reports on YouTube Studio, letting you see key metrics such as views, watch time, subscribers and revenue. If you want a basic understanding of how your channel is performing without getting into the nitty-gritty of data analytics, your channel analytics report is your main priority. These are your main metrics because views and watch time decide whether ot not your channel is successful enough or not to be monetised, which requires 1000 subscribers and 4,0000 watch hours in the past 12 months.
Audience Retention
The audience retention report lets you see how long people have been engaging with the videos on your channel. This is important because some of your content may be long-form and some may be short-form. Typically, short-form videos will generally have a higher audience retention due to their nature of requiring less time to watch. Analysing some of your longer-form content, how long it is being watched for, and different points of the video at which viewers are dropping off, is helpful in understanding if creating this type of content is working for you or if you need to change up the length or timings on your videos to keep people engaged and what works for you. The more people engage with your videos, the more likely they are to be pushed by the algorithm, so having content that is too long or making people lose interest will likely make your channel stand still.
Traffic Sources
The traffic sources report can be a very great analytical tool when diving deeper into how your YouTube channel is performing. Traffic Sources let you know how all your different viewers are finding you. This is important because by understanding how your viewers are finding you, you will know how to find them, or other areas you need to improve. For example, if over 60% of your traffic is coming to your YouTube channel externally from Google, it is important that you maintain a high level fo SEO on your videos including titles, thumbnails, descriptions, tags and more to keep appearing in google search, while understanding thatgrowing your channel in this way will eventually help to gain more traffic through YouTube search.
What this means for marketers
While reports such as channel performance allow for an overview of performance, marketers who want to make a deep dive into more nuanced areas of performance, extracting data to make educated decisions on selected videos, can do so by looking at different, more in-depth reports such as audience retention, traffic sources and more to improve performance over time.
