YouTube Audience Analytics
Who is watching your YouTube videos? Leaving comments? Liking and subscribing?Â
Are you reaching the people you want to target with your content?Â
The answers to all these questions ultimately determine your YouTube content strategy – and the success or failure of your channel.Â
That’s where YouTube audience analytics comes in. Here’s everything you need to know.
What is YouTube audience analytics?
YouTube audience analytics is basically what it says on the box – a deep-dive into who your viewers are and how they find your content.Â
Information that you can get on your audience includes their geographic location, age group, gender distribution, other interests, and time spent online. You’ll also get insights into the other channels your audience watches, formats that they prefer, what device types they use, and whether they switch on subtitles (and, if so, in which language).
All of this information is critical to your YouTube content strategy.Â
For one thing, you’ll be able to assess whether your current audience matches your target audience.Â
Say you’re a hiking and adventure channel and you are aiming to negotiate brand deals with US outdoor gear manufacturers – but your audience is mostly based in India. You’ll have to pivot your strategy to make sure your viewership actually matches the target customers of your potential partners.
For another, taking a closer look at your audience’s behavior will help you get inspiration for more video content. Checking out what other channels they watch, and whether they prefer short- or long-form content can give you valuable pointers when it comes to upcoming content.Â
Plus, matching your uploads to the times when your audience is typically online can give you a serious algorithmic boost. Having a large section of your viewers instantly click on your video when it comes online sends a positive signal to YouTube’s algorithm that makes it more likely that it will get featured in search results and recommendations.
How to perform YouTube audience analytics?
That said, how do you actually perform YouTube audience analytics?Â
Systematically getting to know your YouTube audience involves several steps, all of them centered in YouTube Studio.Â
First, you need to start at the channel level. This will give you the statistics on who, on average, watches your videos as well as where they are based, what other content they like to watch etc. Getting this information is fairly straightforward and you can break it down based on whether people are already subscribed to your channel or not.Â
Where it gets more complex, however, is once you start breaking audience analytics down by video. You can get the statistics on your audience demographics and behavior not just averaged out across all your content, but for each video you’ve uploaded. Comparing audiences between different videos is particularly useful if your overall audience doesn’t match your target demographics. Breaking audience analytics down by video will help you pinpoint if any of your content does resonate with the people you are trying to reach. Once you have this information, you can pivot your strategy accordingly.
To add another level of complexity, you can break down audience behavior – both on each video and for your channel overall – over different periods of time. The standard view is to look at the previous 28 days, but you can adjust this based on what periods interest you. Have there been significant trends in your viewers’ watch time behavior over the past six months? Do you observe seasonal fluctuations when looking at the lifetime performance of a video?Â
All of this will give you nuanced and detailed information to inform your overall channel strategy.Â
Let a YouTube channel manager run audience analytics for you!
Sounds like a lot of work? It is. Not gonna lie about that.Â
Diving deep into audience analytics, especially on a per-video basis, and making sense of all the data you see takes time, effort, and an intimate understanding of each of the metrics YouTube displays.Â
Fortunately, there’s another way to get the same actionable insights. Let someone else run your audience analytics for you.Â
You can get a seasoned YouTube channel manager to handle your analytics for you – not just regarding your audience’s demographics, but also your overall channel health and the performance on each of your videos.Â
Professional channel managers are experts at interpreting complex metrics, parsing the massive amount of information YouTube Studio offers, and condensing the most important takeaways into action items for you.Â
At Tasty Edits, our staff of over 35 video production professionals includes a team of high-level YouTube channel managers who are ready to run a channel audit, help you fine-tune your strategy, deliver regular reports, and supercharge your growth!Â
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