How to Create an Insightful YouTube Analytics Report

With over 2.1 billion users, YouTube is a force to be reckoned with, even in comparison with major social media platforms. Besides leisure and fun, it's also used by many marketers to drive results for their clients. But unlike the standard user, marketers, and agencies need more detailed analytics to show the progress of their work.

Digital marketers, regardless of what platforms they use, need to track metrics and analyze results. If they work for a certain client, or within an agency, realtime reporting becomes a weekly, monthly – and sometimes even a daily routine.

In today’s article, we’ll provide a detailed guide on building a YouTube analytics report fast – without skimping on any vital metrics.

Let's begin with curating marketing objectives.

Understand your YouTube marketing objectives

Before we get started, we suggest you refrain from looking at various articles outlining the metrics "you must track.” What works for some people – in regards to what metrics they have their eyes on – may not work for you. What KPIs you use to measure success will undoubtedly depend on your objectives.

Hence, you should start by prioritizing your goals. Are you looking to build brand awareness, increase engagement, or perhaps drive additional sales? The metrics you'll be paying attention to will typically depend on how you respond to those questions.

What metrics should you be tracking?

When it comes to selecting the YouTube metrics you want to track, the more you track, the messier it can get. Choose a few metrics that are consistent with your priorities and help you define what success for your marketing team looks like. This will help you to focus on your marketing efforts on YouTube. In other words, these metrics should:

• Tell you if you have accomplished your targets,
• Tell you what you can do to improve your results.
• Tell you if your YouTube thumbnail is getting clicks.
• Performance metrics, such as video views, average view length, and subscriber growth are good metrics if you want to quantify knowledge.
• Pay attention to likes, comments, and shares if you want to quantify engagement.
• To calculate revenue, use projected sales or estimated revenue as the best metrics.

Now, let us go back to our example. Say you want to get more exposure to your site, maybe a homepage or a landing page. So, you’ll need to know if there are a lot of people watching your videos and playlists and how much time they spend watching them. In this scenario, you should be tracking:

Video Views: The number of times people have watched your videos—the bigger the number of views, the higher your YouTube SEO rating would be and the better you perform in YouTube search.

Average view duration: this is determined by total view time/total video playback (including replays.) A higher average viewing time means that your viewer finds your specific video useful.

Estimated watch time: how much time the audience spends viewing individual videos.

The growth rate of subscribers: the number of subscribers that you’ve gained and lost over time.

Say you want to connect with your audience. So, you should focus on your engagement metrics and track where your subscribers are coming from. Here’s what you should measure:

• Likes and dislikes: the number of likes and dislikes on your videos.
• Shares: the number of times your videos have been shared by your target audience.
• Video watching by device type: which devices people are using to watch your videos.
• Views by country: from which countries (or states) your traffic originates. In other words, traffic source types.

Time to create your analytics report

After you have a list of the metrics that you want to track, it's time to put them together in a report using analytics tools. Think about what types of charts are best suited for presenting each data set (we’ll provide you with some visual examples throughout.)

In this report, we’ll focus on subscriber growth, engagement, average viewing metrics, location, and top-performing videos. We’ll be comparing the numbers to the previous period to see if they have grown or declined and how much.

This is a rather lengthy report, so we’ll break it down into sections, working my way from top to bottom.

Subscriber metrics

Tracking subscriber growth rates is something that must be done when creating YouTube content with YouTube Studio. It directly translates into how effective you are at appealing to a specific audience that’s looking to get easier access to your content.

Content viewing metrics

How exactly are your videos performing in aggregate? It helps your client or an executive to know just how enticing the video content is and how many unique viewers you have. Here, we’re referring to tracking viewer metrics: view %, and view duration.

In the example above, we’ve picked a line graph to showcase video view numbers in relation to the average view percentage. This helps you get a better understanding of how certain videos captivate the viewer’s attention long enough for them to view the entire video.

Measuring viewer perception of your video content

The beloved metric - likes and dislikes - are what the key metrics that assess viewer perception of your content. As aptly named, this engagement metric tells you if your audience enjoys the content and if you're also establishing audience retention.

We advise using a line graph to show the growth of likes and dislikes over a certain time period. Pictured above, you can clearly see the fluctuation in likes and dislikes over an entire month.

Chances are, you may also need to provide comparison data within the same report. It makes assessing progress and channel performance much easier.

Other engagement metrics you cannot forget

We’ve covered likes and dislikes, however, those are not the only video engagement metrics. You should also see if your audience enjoyed the videos enough to share them or to comment.

It's good to lump this data in just below the like/dislike line graph. This way, you’re creating a nice-looking report section of all the relevant engagement metrics in a date range.

Again, you will want to include comparison data to a previous reporting period to gauge progress. It's an effective way to get a sense of how the entire YouTube channel analytics are progressing and if it’s engaging the audience.

Where is your audience engaging from?

Every marketer should know their ideal audience profile and geographic location is one criterion that defines it. Hence, knowing where your audience is located and how they are interacting with your YouTube videos is crucial.

See if your videos are attracting the right demographic from your desired geographic location. Are they viewing the content in a positive light? Include the geographic location of viewers, along with their respected engagement metrics.

Top video performers

One way to improve your video content is to analyze what you've done in the past. This means looking at the top videos you've created and what type of engagement those videos have garnered.

We’re almost there! In the last part of the report, you can include the portion of the top-performing video. It's rather granular data that dives deep into each individual piece of content.

As you gather data like this, you can assess the type of video topics that performed well and how your audience perceived them. This is a phenomenal way to help develop future marketing strategies that adhere to your audience's expectations and desires.

Assess the report and present the metrics

YouTube analytics data is nothing but plain numbers until you examine it and take action on it. Look at the key metrics and think about how overtime has changed. Is there a trend of change? Why has anything changed? Is there anything you might do to boost your performance?

An in-depth report provides a great overview of how you're performing while also paving a way for successful marketing campaigns. Hopefully, this article gave you some ideas as to how you can more effectively present YouTube performance metrics to clients, executives, or your in-house marketing team.

You are welcome to try out our pre-built YouTube analytics report template for free. The report is already built for you, just connect your YouTube account and your data will be extracted automatically. Enjoy mastering the YouTube algorithm!

And if you're on the lookout for reporting apps that can help you create stunning YouTube analytics reports, sign up for your free trial of Whatagraph today!