[Andres Palmiter] Hello my name is Andres Palmiter, and I work in Audience Development at YouTube
and today we're going to talk about understanding your audience.
[♪ music ♪] [Understand Your Audience] [YouTube]
A lot of people ask me how to define success—I think there are a couple different ways.
One, a lot of creators look at their watch page
where their video actually is and they look at the public numbers.
You can see the number of views the video has,
you can look at the number of comments there are; you can also look at the likes and dislikes.
A lot of folks will take the likes and the dislikes and they'll create a little ratio.
They understand that after every upload there is a certain bar of success that they should be looking for.
So a video may have a certain amount of viewership after one day,
a certain amount of viewership after three days, after one week.
If the like to dislike ratio is really high
that means that people really enjoy the video content,
and if it tends to fall a little bit below maybe there were some creative choices
that the audience didn't really understand or didn't even like.
Also you can tell in the comments—you can do sentiment analysis, right?
Which is just a fancy way of saying read the comments,
understand what the people are saying, and then make decisions based off of that.
YouTube analytics allows you to look at your entire roster of videos.
You can understand the likes and dislikes, the number of comments,
the number of views day-over-day for all of your videos combined.
That gives you a birds-eye view of actually what's happening on your channel, not just your newer uploads.
It's really important to understand that your new uploads
may only account for a small percentage of your total views.
So one thing that analytics allows you to do really easily
is look at day-over-day, month-over-month, or year-over-year trends.
And that's a fancy way of just saying, "Where am I today compared to yesterday?"
"Where am I this week compared to last week?"
"Where am I this month compared to last month?"
"Where am I this year compared to last year?"
If you've been on YouTube making videos for a long time,
you can actually compare where you are now compared to before.
That helps you kind of move away from "What's happening on my new uploads?"
and look at the big picture, which is really helpful.
There are a couple of other reports that I suggest that people look at when they're making these decisions creatively.
One is the traffic sources report.
It may sound a little counterintuitive to look at traffic sources
to understand creatively how your videos are doing,
but what traffic sources allows you to do is to see really quickly
what blogs are picking up your videos,
what social media sites are picking up your videos,
what parts of YouTube are driving traffic to your videos as well, which is really important.
And from there you can make decisions about, "Do my thumbnails and titles need to be better?"
If suggested video is actually lagging a little bit,
it may indicate that your thumbnails and titles need to be a little bit stronger.
If search is lagging a little bit,
maybe you aren't applying the right keywords when you first upload the video.
So maybe your tags can be a little bit stronger.
And then after that, if blogs are picking up your content,
it kind of helps you understand who your audience is, right?
So if certain blogs are picking up certain videos that you make,
you may think, "Maybe I should make more of those.
"Maybe I should change the creative direction of my channel a little bit
so that I have more appeal to these blogs, which I really respect and want to be embedded on more often."
I usually suggest to people, look at the traffic sources report,
pick out the sites that show up there and then try to reach out to the editorial staff at those sites
and say, "Hey, I'm going to help you do your job, I'm going to feed you awesome videos that you can embed
and that helps me too cause it gives more attention to the videos that I spend so much time making."
The audience retention port I think is fantastic.
You can actually go in and see for individual videos
how long people are staying and watching throughout the entire video.
So it'll look like a graph, every graph starts at 100%
and then you see sort of a drop off.
That's the absolute audience retention report
and you can make a lot of creative decisions from looking at that report.
You can see, "Maybe I should change the intro of my videos,
maybe I should talk about this thing that gets a lot of engagement
in the middle of the video in the front of the video,"
"Maybe my videos are five minutes now, but people are staying and watching for the entire five minutes—
maybe I can do a seven or eight-minute long video."
These are the things that you can take from the audience retention report
that I think are really valuable when you're planning out your next video
and planning out your next series of videos on YouTube.
Hope you found that helpful, for more information about analytics you can click here.
If you want to see a playlist of all the videos of people talking about different creative strategies that they employ,
there's an awesome playlist and you can click to that as well.
There's also a bunch of links in the description that you should check out.
Alright, thanks a lot.
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