Hi Andre and I'm a black nerd [Andre Meadows - Creator - Black Nerd Comedy]
from the YouTube channel Black Nerd Comedy,
and I'm here to talk to you about how to use analytics
to turn your viewers into long-term fans.
It's about to get analytical up in this piece.
♪ music ♪
[YouTube - Mastering engagement with your viewers]
[How do you know your video is doing well?]
When I upload a video, I look really closely at its early tracking.
So I'll check to see— if the Tweet goes out—
I'll do the publishing public,
and when you publish public, you can have it go automatically to Twitter,
so I'll make sure that Tweet goes out.
I'll make sure that viewers are watching it
and getting it in their feeds or in their in-boxes
if they're subscribed with e-mail notifications.
And I can usually tell that by the first number
of views that I get, the first number of comments I get.
I check really hard with comments to see if people
are watching the video,
if they are doing comments about the video.
I do a lot of commenting back; I'll do a lot of replies,
particularly in those first 24 hours,
I try to reply as much as possible to those early adopters
because usually what will happen is they will start
to share the video out more to people,
and then that gets it really going, especially when you can get people
to share your video out at its first launch.
So in those first couple of days, it's really helpful because
it's around and it shows it has some kind of traction or trending to it.
If I notice that a video is really taking off,
it's getting a lot of views, a lot of shares, a lot of comments,
I will usually check analytics to see what's happening with that video.
So some of the things I'll check out is its traffic sources.
Where's the video being seen?
What kind of key words are being used to find the video?
I'll see the retention, if the audience retention is really high,
if someone is actually watching it towards the end.
Sometimes I can usually tell because I'll ask a question
or do some kind of communication or a call to action
towards the end of the video, and so I'll notice—if in a lot of the comments—
I'm seeing results of that call to action, then I'll know that people
are actually watching through the video and doing that.
Or at the very least, reading through the comments and interacting with others,
and putting their call to action as well.
So that is very helpful.
Then every once in a while, I will just check out my analytics for the channel
as a whole; I'll see—particularly with the traffic sources
and the keywords—where people are finding my videos
and also, what they're using to search
since—you know—YouTube has Google behind it,
it's a big search engine; So I like to see that people
are putting in certain key words and finding out what kind of topics
are things that they are interested in.
That was how I was able to find that Black Nerd Rants,
which is a type of video I do where I just rant about geek culture
and get really angry about it, I found out that that was actually very popular
because I was seeing that after doing a few of those.
People were actually searching Black Nerd Rants
as a key word to try to find new videos of mine.
[How do you know your videos are attracting subscribers?]
Usually after every video, I can kind of see if it's helping out
with getting a bunch of new subscribers.
I'll check my daily subscriber intake to see if I'm getting
a new batch of subscribers particularly after a certain video.
I'll also check the annotations. I do an annotation at the end of my videos.
I say, "Hey, if you like what you see here, subscribe for new videos."
And if I'm seeing there's a good click through rate
of that in my analytics, then I know that that video
has been really helpful in getting new subscribers.
Also I put a link in the description.
I, usually in the first or second line, will have a link to subscribe to my channel.
So that's also helpful as well.
So that's a good way just to remind people to get subscribers.
When it comes to the end annotations and calls to action,
I usually ask a question or try to incite more conversation,
or I'll ask to subscribe. I will sometimes, also put links to other videos.
But I will try to be very cautious about not asking for too much.
A mistake I made back in the day,
I used to have subscribe link, annotate here,
5 different videos you should link too,
and what happened was, I was asking for so much call to action,
that I ended up having nothing happen
because I would go back and check my analytics and see everyone
is either not clicking these things or their actually closing them.
So I cut back on some of those annotations
and really made it very focused, and I noticed that when I focused
on specifically made a call to action,
could you check out a specific video or to subscribe
or just something very specific and called it out,
I started seeing a higher click through rate of those annotations
or those specific calls to action happening.
Thank you all so much. I hope you found this video helpful.
If you want to learn more, then poom!
Click that annotation, and you
will get to see more content to help you out,
and if you want to see more of me on my channel,
Black Nerd Comedy, click here!
There it is. There's a picture of my face.
Click on it and then you will get to see more of me
because you know you want to!
Okay, I won't dance like that if click.
[Who should we feature next?]