From Creator to Critic: Evaluating Video Value Across Platforms

YouTube Analytics – How to analyze your and Competitor’s YouTube Video

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Tracking your brand’s YouTube metrics is not enough to ensure success in YouTube. Unless you garner deep insights of your competitors. You must be thinking how can you gauge their company insights using YouTube and track the data movement as well. There is nothing to worry about, we have got you covered. We will show you how to analyze your own channel as well as that of your competitors’ YouTube analytics. Let’s now explore about it!

How to analyze your own YouTube channel/video?

It is important to have reliable YouTube analytics tools for your brand, as videos on YouTube are searchable through Google. They contribute to generate organic traffic for you using both Google and YouTube as a medium. YouTube has a default dedicated analytics mechanism to measure how the video fares in YouTube to gain the most out of it.

Here we have collated the broadly used YouTube insights to ensure that your highly equipped, SEO compatible video engages more audience and performs well. The matrix sums up the most essential parts of YouTube analytics. Let’s go through them.

1. Views

Though, views determine the number of people clicked on a certain video on YouTube, it’s impossible to figure out whether the video has been watched till the end or not. Moreover, they can be altered through clickbait tricks and hence YouTube doesn’t solely put much value on them.

Views along with watch time turn out to be the best bet. Watch time sums up the total amount of time spent (in terms of minutes) on your brand’ videos. With the updated dashboard it becomes easy to get the YouTube analytics and gauge the video’s performance. Using the average view duration, you can know whether your video is being watched till the end or not.

2. Playback Location

As ‘Playback locations’ of YouTube videos can reveal where does all the traffic come from, it would help your channel figure out for which location the video has fared well. It will guide you to reach the backlinks locations/sites. Knowing the popular locations for your YouTube video being played, you can know whether YouTube is the search engine or they have been diverted from somewhere else. Depending on the video playing locations, the views will be segregated in to embedded video, YouTube watch page, mobile devices, and YouTube channel page. Understanding location specific views would help you decide where should you focus to enhance the performance of your video.

3. Demographics

The demographics page helps you get YouTube insights, using them you can know the audience in a gender and location specific manner. For local businesses targeting a certain region, YouTube analytics would prove to be a boon. You can also know the geography and device used by the viewers with this feature. Understanding the gender and location of people will help you create dedicated product videos that would be helpful to them.

4. Traffic sources

Understanding the source of your YouTube video’s traffic would help you track the prominent keywords that viewers use for landing at your YouTube video. You can figure out their choice and their search patterns this way. The YouTube insights will show you whether the viewers found your video by searching YouTube, a channel on YouTube, through suggested videos, or an external link. The YouTube Analytics tool’s panel would assist you in finalizing the most beneficial traffic source for your brand. You can optimize your video and keyword strategy with this.

5. Audience Retention

This data explains how far your video has engaged your audience. Along with views, the duration that a viewer is on your video weighs too. From the audience retention page, you can find out the specific time that a viewer has exited your video and see what made them do so. There are 2 types of audience retention features – absolute audience retention and relative audience retention.

6. Devices

It is important to know which device is being used to watch the video. The metrics is distributed among mobile phones, computer, TV, tablet etc. you will be able to understand whether your video needs to be optimized for a certain video or not.

7. Likes and dislikes

YouTube insights gauge the audience acceptance for your video by the number of likes and dislikes. Videos with a huge number of like implies that it is loved by people, though, the quality of video can’t exactly be defined by the number of likes or dislikes. Even the best quality video created for asking opinions about a certain situation/issue might be good enough but still get dislikes.

8. Subscribers

YouTube analytics help you determine the engagement metrics to explain the origin of your subscribers. It includes both their geo-location, the date of subscription, and the source/medium they used to land with your video on YouTube. You can observe the number of people subscribing and unsubscribing from your YouTube channel.

The subscription stream enables your audience to get suggestions for new videos from your channel and offer better exposure to the service and products you offer.

You May Also Like : How to Get More Subscribers

9. Annotations

While considering YouTube Analytics, it is essential to understand that there are annotations to guide viewers to your business site for more content. It is not necessary that the content is video only, it might include a blog post as well. This will let you understand the click through rate and ‘close’ rates for every annotation. This in turn will assist you in optimizing how to reach your audience and where to place the annotations.

10. Comments

Audience engagement on any YouTube video can easily be gauged by using the vital aspect known as comments. Either it touched a chord in their heart, inspired or motivated them, or simply made them smile, the comments will say it all. Sometimes the audience simply taps ‘Like’ in place of commenting at their convenient.

11. Cards

Cards is a new feature in YouTube analytics and aimed at replacing annotations. This will improve user interactivity of any video and accelerate the engagement. They will act as call to action for informing visitors regarding playlists, videos, merchandising, fan funding, and associated website etc.

12. Sharing

This aspect sums up the amount of shares of the YouTube video across different social networks along with the share date. Google ranking is influenced with the share numbers, as higher the number more the chances of unique backlinks for your videos.

13. Videos in playlists

Favorites has been renamed to ‘Videos in playlists’. Your reach broadens as people keep marking your videos as favorites on their playlist. This is visible to the public on the YouTube channel itself.

How to analyze your competitors

Although, you can’t see the dashboard data of your competitor, there are still some ways to observe and study your competitors’ successful videos and from their views, favorites, ratings, and comments find out the driving force behind it.

For example, reading the comments and see what they are saying. Notice both the positive and negative ones so that you can incorporate the ideas in your videos. You can also make a better video by understanding what a specific demographic region is fond of watching in the said niche.

Or you can use those analyzing tools below to discover the more stats of your competitors.

1. InflueNex

InflueNex is a helpful influencer marketing tool for Analyzing, searching, and managing YouTubers. With the help of this YouTube analytics tool, you’re able to learn your competitors’ channels and videos with detailed information.

2. Rival IQ

This YouTube analytics tool helps you increase social media engagement, conduct competitive analysis to track competition, discovers new content ideas for your target audience. You can use it to leverage your foothold in YouTube.

3. SocialBlade

SocialBlade helps you gain YouTube insights and enables you to understand how your rival brands fare. You can learn from them and enhance your own strategy to beat them.

Read More to Get: 5 Methods to Go Frame by Frame on YouTube Video >>

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

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Ace Search Engine Rankings on YouTube: 11 Proven SEO Methods

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More than 85% of businesses use YouTube videos as a marketing tool. YouTube is the second most visited website on the internet, with users uploading over 500 hours of video content every minute. Because video SEO is constantly evolving, you need to stay current on optimization best practices to rank higher on search results.

Luckily, this article offers YouTube SEO tips to help you create a solid strategy that will help you rank your videos.

In this article

How Does YouTube SEO Work?

11 Useful YouTube SEO Tips to Help Boost Your Video Ranking

How Does YouTube SEO Work?

YouTube SEO is an excellent way to ensure your videos get more views. The main goal of YouTube SEO is to rank high for specific keywords in search engines. As such, it is crucial to know how YouTube SEO works if you want to boost the ranking of your videos.

Whether you are a blogger, market researcher, or video marketer, you need YouTube SEO to generate traffic to your videos. YouTube SEO involves optimizing your videos, channel, descriptions, metadata, and playlists. You can optimize videos for search within and outside YouTube.

Because search engine bots can’t watch YouTube videos, they depend on accompanying text data when indexing them. So you must also know how to harness the power of text in your video, which can positively impact SEO, viewership, engagement, and user experience.

Watch Video: YouTube SEO Tips 2022: Boost Your Video Ranking

11 Useful YouTube SEO Tips to Help Boost Your Video Ranking

Want to drive more traffic and increase your video views? Here are eleven YouTube SEO tips that will help you to boost your video ranking.

1. Conduct Keyword Research First

When it comes to YouTube SEO, keywords are crucial. YouTube uses these keywords to determine the subject of your video, index the content, and then associate it with what users are searching for. As such, you must add them to certain fields, including description, tags, and title, when you are uploading the video file. YouTube will then get this information and use it to rank your video.

For this reason, you have to know the keywords that best identify your videos and have the potential to attract viewers to your channel.

2. Use a Good Video Title

The title of your video is the first thing other people see, and it’s what decides whether or not they watch it. Given how important it is, you’ll want to make sure that your title accurately reflects the content of your video and includes all relevant keywords.

3. Link Your Videos Directly to Your Website

Each time you publish a new video, make sure you embed it on your website or blog. Not only will this encourage viewers to stay on your website instead of leaving immediately, but it will also make it easier for search engines crawlers to index your website.

4. Add Tags To The Video Description

When you upload your video, remember to add tags to the “About” section of the page. You can do this by adding some relevant keywords with each tag like you would with blog posts.

When planning your strategy for YouTube keywords, you need to find 10-20 single keyword tags you want to rank for; keep in mind that this platform limits the number of tags users can include in a video. So you should first add the most relevant keyword phrases then include specific multi-word tags that will easily rank on top of search results.

5. Edit The Filename

The filename of your video, or the “video URL,” can also affect its rankings. Including keywords in this section will help the crawlers index your video faster, which will increase its chances of ranking higher.

6. Add Subtitles and Closed Captions

Adding subtitles and closed captions to your videos is also a good idea, especially if you want the video’s ranking and viewership to improve. Subtitles make it easier for new viewers to understand your videos, especially if your audience comes from different linguistic backgrounds.

7. Select Video Category

When uploading a video, be sure to select the most appropriate category for it. Essentially, this helps with SEO optimization because choosing the right category means that YouTube’s algorithm will place your video in the proper search results. In turn, viewers will easily find your video and watch it.

8. Use a Compelling Thumbnail

Make sure you use the right YouTube video thumbnail image , as this makes a big difference in the click-through rate. You might want to use high-quality, high-contrast images with a 16:9 aspect ratio. YouTube will choose which frame it will display as the video thumbnail. The platform will present three screenshots that you can choose from; however, you can upload your image or select a shot of another moment in the video.

Remember that YouTube overlays the duration of the video in the corner of your thumbnail. So make sure it does not obstruct any relevant details in your thumbnail. Google also uses image recognition to filter out specific imagery, including the YouTube logo.

Ideally, you need an image that is a perfect visual representation of the keywords you are targeting. In turn, this is going to take your presence in relevant search results even further.

9. Make High-Quality Longer

Videos that are less than 2 minutes long often rank low. The duration of most of the videos in the first five positions is usually 11 minutes 44 seconds. Therefore, you need to invest in longer videos that are around 10 minutes long. These videos meet the expectations of many users seeking complete and in-depth content. Additionally, you should create high-quality videos to ensure your viewers will keep watching.

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