Are you struggling to gain traction with your YouTube content? Spoiler alert: you already have the keys to your success.
It all starts here: understanding how to track your YouTube Analytics. Across both your YouTube Channel and individual videos, YouTube offers powerful insights into how your content is performing and what viewers want to see from your brand.
Take the guesswork out of tracking your performance on YouTube with these handpicked YouTube Analytics tools designed to streamline your path to higher views and deeper audience engagement.
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YouTube Analytics 101: Your FAQs answered
Currently, there are over 2.1 billion YouTube users globally. Plus, YouTube Shorts (the platform’s answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels) have recently tipped over 70 billion daily views. That’s a whole lot of people searching for video content!
With so much content being shared on the platform, it’s never been more important to understand how to cut through the noise and gain traction by reviewing your YouTube analytics. And here’s why.
Why is it important to track YouTube analytics?
YouTube analytics offer valuable insight into the performance of your content and your brand’s channel at large. By tracking key metrics (such as watch time, audience retention, re-watches and unique viewers), you can assess whether your video content is reaching the right audience and holding their attention.
YouTube is the second most popular search engine (after Google), giving your brand huge potential to reach new audiences who are searching for the products, services and knowledge you’re offering.
By tracking your YouTube analytics using tried-and-tested tools, you can understand what topics are relevant to your audience and what styles of video content are most effective at boosting your views and engagement rate, too. It’s all about taking a data-driven approach to content creation that ensures you’re investing your time and effort into the right initiatives.
What are the most important YouTube analytics to track?
There are so many YouTube metrics you can track, both at a channel and individual post level. Ultimately, the most important analytics to track are those related to your goals on YouTube.
In practical terms, that means:
- If you’re looking to boost brand awareness, focus on awareness-level metrics such as viewer demographics, subscriber growth, and video views.
- If you’re looking to foster an engagement community, focus on audience retention metrics such as how many viewers re-watch your content and the number of engagements on your content (such as likes and comments).
- If you’re looking to drive sales or conversions, focus on bottom-of-funnel actions such as your videos’ click-through rate (CTR).
Where can I find my channel’s YouTube analytics?
Ready to dive into your YouTube analytics? Open the YouTube app, tap on your profile picture and select view channel. Navigate to Analytics and tap view analytics.
From here, you’ll score a report of all your key performance metrics, from views to watch time and even your subscriber growth.
Top 5 best YouTube Analytics tools
Leave it to the experts and discover the top YouTube Analytics tools to streamline your reporting.
Tool 1. YouTube Analytics Studio
- Top features:YouTube’s Research tab is a helpful content ideation tool that helps you see what terms and keywords your viewers are searching for on YouTube.
- Pricing: Free
- Best for: Emerging brands or creators beginning to experiment with YouTube content.
The best place to start with YouTube analytics tools has to be the platform’s native insights studio. Available to all channels and creators, this in-built analytics platform gives you a helpful insight into your channel and content’s performance.
Use the Overview tab to grab a speedy summary of your account’s performance at a glance before diving deeper into channel-specific and video-specific metrics.
If you’re experimenting with YouTube for the first time, this is a beginner-friendly tool you should use to track your content performance and your account’s analytics.
Tool 2. TubeBuddy
- Top features: Learn how to optimize your YouTube thumbnails with powerful insights into how to boost the discoverability of your videos.
- Pricing: Free browser extension
- Best for: Creators and brands looking to A/B test thumbnails with advanced testing features.
Ready to boost your views on YouTube with practical insights into how to improve the design of your videos? Say hello to TubeBuddy, a free browser extension that harnesses AI to help you optimize your content.
If you’re looking to boost click-through rates, TubeBuddy’s advanced thumbnail analyzer tool is a game changer. Get ready to easily A/B test thumbnail options to see which style of creative is the most effective at driving clicks and video views.
Tool 3. Tubular
- Top features: Tubular offers the world’s largest single source of truth for social video, with advanced video analytics across your own content and your competitors.
- Pricing: Free trial available, paid pricing available on request
- Best for: Creators looking to improve their video content performance across a range of platforms, including YouTube.
Want to keep tabs on video trends and the performance of your competitor’s YouTube content? Look no further than Tubular, an advanced social video analytics tool that makes it easy to boost the performance of your videos.
What’s interesting about Tubular is the platform doesn’t just offer a snapshot of how your own YouTube content is performing. In fact, the platform analyzes millions of accounts and billions of pieces of content to give you the inside scoop on how to stay ahead.
Tool 4. VidIQ
- Top features: Leverage AI to gain a 24/7 coaching companion, allowing you to chat and discover high-performing content ideas, thumbnail suggestions and best-practice video descriptions.
- Pricing: Free plan available
- Best for: Creators and small teams looking to publish videos on YouTube at scale but still want to ensure each video is optimized for success.
AI is everywhere on social media, helping creators and brands speed up the process of planning and creating content. In the case of VidIQ, this YouTube analytics tools is designed to help you boost the performance of your video content with insights and guidance to keep your account growing.
Think of VidIQ as your AI content creation coach. Using GPT-4, the tool uses data analysis to offer handpicked keyword, title and description recommendations. Plus, the tool even offers trend predictions and performance forecasts to help you continue to optimize your content.
Tool 5. BrandWatch
- Top features: An all-in-one suite allow you to conduct consumer research, social listening and benchmarking on YouTube and beyond.
- Pricing: Available upon request
- Best for: Established brands and creators looking for a powerful social listening tool that offers analytics across YouTube and beyond.
While not technically a YouTube-specific analytics tool, BrandWatch is a powerful solution that allows big brands and established creators to gain the upper hand with content marketing.
Within BrandWatch, you can conduct consumer research to understand audience interests and sentiment towards your YouTube content. Plus, you can easily conduct social listening across your YouTube videos and comments over the past 12 months and see how your social strategy stacks up to your key competitors.
By analyzing everything from average views to watch duration and follower growth, BrandWatch is an advanced analytics tool designed to help you gain organic visibility on YouTube and beyond.
Ready to elevate your YouTube game?
Whether you’re struggling to keep up with the fast-paced nature of social media or simply want to devote more time to growing your business and focusing on those tasks that take place offline, Plann’s range of features is sure to help save you time with an automated social media strategy.
From AI-generated captions to cross-posting, analytics, hashtags and more, Plann can help you maintain a consistent posting schedule while you remain focused on business growth.
Plus, you can now schedule your YouTube Shorts on Plann! With our YouTube Shorts Scheduler, you’ll be able to get more content planned, created, and seen.
Go on, and redeem your 7-day free trial of Plann Plus. If you don’t like it, keep using Plann for free!
