A YouTube Analytics Tutorial, Part 2: Go Deep With View Reports
This is the second in a two-part entry level tutorial of YouTube Analytics (YTA). In the first article, we detailed how to access the analytics and gave an overview of the interface and operation. In this article, we'll focus on tools in YTA's Views reports section.
Views Report
Once in YTA, if you click Views in the menu, or Performance in the Overview results, you open the Views report (Figure 1). This shows the total number of views for the included videos over the designated period. For the record, you only get a view when someone presses play to start video playback; videos that autostart when a page opens are not counted.
Figure 1. The Views report. Note that you can click any video on the bottom of the report to open a Views report for that video.
On the left of the chart you can see the different graph views available, which include line (the default, which is shown), multi-line, stacked area, and pie chart, as well a geography chart that displays a worldwide heat map showing the location of your viewers. On the bottom, the default view is for the video or videos being analyzed, though you can also click Geography to show the aforementioned worldwide heat map with per-country detail or show the views by date or by the subtitled language.
Paradoxically, the key item in the Views menu isn't the actual views, but the estimated minutes watched. That's because when YouTube updated its video discovery features in August 2012, it changed the focus of its recommendations from videos with lots of views to videos with longer estimated minutes watched and longer average view duration. Here's why, from this YouTube Creator's blog post:
Over the past few months we have made some changes to YouTube to encourage people to spend more time watching, interacting, and sharing with the community. To support this, we've updated what we call video discovery features, meaning how our viewers find videos to watch via search and suggested videos. These changes better surface the videos that viewers actually watch, over those that they click on and then abandon.
Why this shift? Our video discovery features were previously designed to drive views. This rewarded videos that were successful at attracting clicks, rather than the videos that actually kept viewers engaged. (Cleavage thumbnails, anyone?) Now when we suggest videos, we focus on those that increase the amount of time that the viewer will spend watching videos on YouTube, not only on the next view, but also successive views thereafter.
The post goes on to say that the change was successful, and that the amount of time viewers spent on site "increased immediately." Overall, while views are gratifying, from a YouTube promotional perspective their value is limited, which is key if your strategy is to acquire eyeballs from YouTube (and why else would you be on YouTube?). Intuitively, of course, retention is also key for accomplishing the fundamental business goal of the video, which is tough to achieve if the viewer clicks away after the first few seconds. So, while Views is the first report presented, it's actually better to focus on the last report, Audience retention, which is covered below.
Demographics Report: The Age, Gender, and Location of Your Viewers
Next up is the demographics report, which shows the gender, age, and geographic location of your viewers. Figure 2 shows the Demographics chart for a group of videos from a Renee Marie concert shot in 2006 and uploaded to YouTube in 2010.
Figure 2. The Demographics report
The importance of this data will vary widely by product or service. For example, if your YouTube marketing efforts are targeting 18- to 24-year-old women, and most of your views are coming from 55- to 64-year-old men, you obviously have a problem. Ditto if you only sell locally, and most views are coming from around the world. Basically, the information in this report will help you determine if your conceptualized target market and actual viewers are aligned.
Playback Location Report: Where Viewers Go to Watch Your Videos
Playback location shows the page, site, or device upon which your video was watched. Briefly, the YouTube watch page is the dedicated YouTube page for the video, the Channel page counts views of that video from your channel page, and the Embedded player are views from players embedded on other sites. YouTube other includes views where YouTube can't detect the source, which are generally assumed to be from the watch page.
Not shown in Figure 3 is the category External apps, which includes Android apps that embed the YouTube Player. Mobile devices is shown in the Figure, and includes views from mobile applications and YouTube's mobile site, but this category is being phased out and only includes data through September 9, 2013. Beyond that date, views on YouTube's mobile site are included with the YouTube Watch page, while other Mobile views will be included in External apps.
Figure 3. Playback locations report
This report has limited usefulness. That's because the Traffic sources report does a better job showing how traffic was driven to your video, while the Devices report does a much better job showing where your video is played, whether on a computer, mobile device, or console. The sole value of this report seems to be the comparative value of the playback on the YouTube web site versus videos that may be embedded in your own or partner sites.
For example, in Figure 3, at 7.8 percent of the total views, and 17 percent of the total minutes watched, videos watched from an embedded player comprises a significant, though not overwhelming, total. Since embedding video into a own site takes seconds, this number would have to be much, much lower to not be worth the effort. On the other hand, the much higher percentage of organic views from the YouTube watch page indicates that YouTube is serving its essential purpose and delivering eyeballs. It also indicates that the work done to make this video findable on YouTube is paying off.
Note that if you select any specific video in this report, you can identify the actual sites into which the video is embedded, and the viewing statistics therefrom. This information is not available when analyzing a group or all the videos in your channel.
Traffic Sources Report: How Viewers Find Your Videos
The Traffic sources report shows how your viewer found your video, whether via external sites or YouTube features like suggested videos or playlists. Drilling down into the specific categories here is useful. For example, click Google search and you can view the search terms used to find your videos, along with estimated minutes watched and average view duration. This provides valuable data for fine-tuning the tags and other metadata included with your videos.
Click External website and you can see the identify of the referral sites, along with the same viewing-related data. If a particular site is pushing a lot of content your way, you might want to contact the owner and formalize a relationship. If a potential source that you've invested significant efforts in developing isn't delivering viewers, maybe it's time to focus your efforts elsewhere.
Figure 4. Traffic sources report
Devices Report: Devices Used to Watch Your Videos
Figure 5 shows the Devices report, which we've customized to show operating system (rather than device) in a pie chart. This shows that desktop viewers dominate, with about 90 percent of total views, with Mac systems edging out Windows by 8 percentage points, not surprising given that the most popular video in the group by far is a Final Cut Pro tutorial. Console game players comprise a tiny percentage of overall views.
Figure 5. Devices report
The value of this information will be different for each producer, particularly since virtually all computer users also have a mobile device, and use them interchangeably for YouTube viewing. Still, this data helps to understand if your impression of your target viewer aligns well with the reality. If your primary focus is Windows users, and you see more and more Mac users creeping in, it might be time to evaluate your focus.
Audience Retention: How Long Your Viewers Watch Your Videos
Given how YouTube values viewing duration over raw view count, retention is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to YouTube promoting your video, as well as your video successfully achieving its underlying purpose. In this regard, YTA's audience retention report, which details how long viewers watch your videos, is arguably the most useful report of the package.
Figure 6 shows the Audience retention report for a group of videos. The data shown in the table below the chart is most interesting. Here you can see the average percentage viewed for each videos in the group, or your entire YouTube library if no group is selected. In the Figure, you see that viewing percentage ranges from a low of 16 percent for a 52-minute webinar on adaptive streaming to a high of 63 percent for a 4 minute 20 second video detailing how to setup three-point lighting.
Table 6. Audience retention for a group of videos
What do these numbers mean? The best researched article we've seen on audience retention is an article entitled Understanding Audience Retention by OVP Wistia. While a number of factors influence retention, video length is the easiest one to quantify, as shown in a table from the article presented in Figure 7.
Briefly, in the analysis, the author broke the video into three sections, the nose (start), body, and tail, and discussed drop-off in each section. Ignoring those details to look at the big picture, even a thirty-second video will experience drop-off in the high 30 percent range, so expecting anywhere close to 100 percent is unrealistic. In a moment, we'll show you how YTA lets you see how the retention for any single video compares to other YouTube videos of the same length. On the plus side, the increased drop-off from a one-minute video to a ten-minute video isn't that significant, so once you're above a minute, your focus should be on producing the most engaging video possible, not relentlessly cutting duration.
Figure 7. Engagement Loss by Video Length, from a Wistia blog post
Getting back to YTA, if you click any video in the table on the bottom of the Audience retention report, you open the video specific report shown in Figure 8, which shows the results for a 3 minute 14 second tutorial on embedding the JW Player into a website. YTA tells us that the average viewer watched 1 minute 43 seconds of the video, or 53 percent of total duration, pretty close to the Wistia numbers, and the blue line in the graph shows where individual viewers dropped off. YTA helpfully displays the video beneath the graph so you if there are major drop-offs you can see what's happening in the video just before that point.
Figure 8. Audience retention for a single video
If you click Relative audience retention (Figure 9), YTA shows how your video compares to others of the same duration. Obviously, the more the video stays above the average line, the better your video performs comparatively. This particular video performed pretty well until the last 40 seconds or so, so it's worth going back and seeing what was happening around that time.
Figure 9. How this video performed compared to other YouTube videos of a similar length
Regarding audience retention in general, there are several obvious points. Drop-off is inevitable, so if you leave your call to action or major points to the end of the video, many viewers will never see them. Fortunately, YTA's Audience retention report provides a valuable tool for identifying and potentially diagnosing the drop-off and comparing your results with others. If you want to experiment with alternative ways to start or otherwise produce your videos, YTA provides a useful test bed.
Overall, YTA is a potent, comprehensive suite of reports that provides invaluable data to those marketing on YouTube. While not every report will be useful to every producer, there are some, like audience retention, that will be critical to all, and many with broad based utility. Spending a bit of time learning how to access and apply the data provided should pay big dividends to anyone seeking to monetize their YouTube videos.
Jan Ozer's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net