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YouTube Channel Audit

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What’s the first step in getting serious about growing your YouTube channel? 

If you’re being systematic about it: Get yourself a YouTube channel audit. 

No matter if your channel has been stagnating and you just don’t know why. Or if it has been growing slowly, but too slowly for your liking. Or if you’re suddenly growing, and also don’t know why. A channel audit provides key insights to adjust your strategy and gain momentum. And to keep it. 

But what is it, exactly? And how do you audit your YouTube channel? 

What Is a YouTube Channel Audit?

In principle, a YouTube channel audit is a detailed report on your channel’s performance – and on potential improvements.

It takes a close look at key analytics metrics, from the dynamics of your audience growth (or the lack thereof) to individual pieces of content that perform well (or don’t). In that, it’s similar to regular YouTube channel analytics reports. 

On this basis, an audit contextualizes your channel within the YouTube ecosystem and sees where it fits in. What is your niche? Is it sufficiently specific or too broad? Too narrow? Who are your main competitors, and what are their key strategies? Who are your current viewers, and how do they differ from your ideal target audience in terms of demographics? Does your channel leverage recent trends? Or is there potential for growth you’re missing out on? 

Finally, a channel audit also takes a closer look at your personal YouTube brand. Is your voice consistent and recognizable in the design of your banner and your thumbnails? Do you fully leverage your video titles, tags, and descriptions to resonate with your audience? 

A channel audit sets out to answer all of these questions. It’s how you check if your YouTube strategy overall is working – or not.

Excerpt from a Tasty Edits channel audit: Analysis of the top performing videos.

How to audit a YouTube channel?

That said, how do you actually audit a YouTube channel?  

How exactly you go about it – and in which sequence – depends on your channel, especially its size and the amount of content you’ve already uploaded. Generally, though, there are several key topics to cover: 

  • Your channel branding (colors, fonts, graphic design, thumbnails, voice, 
) 
  • Your niche and content coherence (subjects covered, level of specialization, profitability of your niche, main competitors and trends, 
) 
  • Analytics (audience demographics, overall performance in terms of views and subscribers, performance of individual pieces of content, dropoffs, 
) 
  • Potential to leverage larger YouTube trends (Shorts, Community posts, A/B thumbnail testing, AI and different monetization features) 

Based on all these factors, a YouTube channel audit will culminate in recommendations for growth. These might include:

  • better SEO-optimization of your content
  • shifting your focus to better resonate with your target audience
  • niching down further
  • updating your branding
  • unifying thumbnail design for instant recognition and boosting your CTR
  • reformatting some of your content to vertical
  • and many more!
A low-quality, home-made thumbnail with a blurry image of a creator looking at the camera, and lime-green writing referencing the video's topic.
A professional-looking thumbnail created by Tasty Edits thumbnail artists, showing a creator in a suit against the background of an American Express credit card.

Strategy suggestions, done: Upgrading the thumbnail quality.

Hire someone to do a YouTube channel audit!

Sounds like a lot of work? It is. 

That’s why there are dedicated professionals out there who specialize in auditing your channel for you – YouTube channel managers. They are seasoned pros at systematically assessing channels, pinpointing weak points, and uncovering potential for growth. 

Hiring a YouTube channel manager to audit your channel also gets you the benefit of an outside perspective. Since you’ve built your channel from the ground up, it’s difficult to be objective about what works and what doesn’t. 

A channel manager starts with a blank slate and will give you an honest, no-nonsense, and data-backed assessment. 

Plus, yours is not the first channel that they work with. At Tasty Edits, for example, our channel managers have years of experience helping creators grow. They can recognize patterns at a glance, parse complicated analytics data, and assess what the most impactful strategy modifications are for each creator they work with. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here.

Going further, a channel manager will help you actually implement the suggestions they give in a channel audit. Instead of passing you a report and wishing you good luck, they’ll be at your side and handle processes like content reformats, SEO-optimization, graphic design adjustments, and community engagement. You’ll also get regular analytics reports with feedback on the impacts of these changes. 

Convinced yet? Get started with channel management today and prepare to go viral!

Join hundreds of
successful businesses.

Get your YouTube channel audit today!

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