Managing a YouTube Channel is nowadays the same as having a website… or maybe it requires even more effort!
As we already told in one of our latest posts, Video will continue to be one of the most critical parts of the web and company’s marketing strategies in 2019, and beyond.
According to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index, videos will dominate overall Internet traffic representing 80% of all Internet traffic by 2021. Hence, including them in your business marketing strategy is still an important step and can make a difference, especially when speaking about an Inbound Marketing strategy.
Nothing more than a video can attract your audience, bringing traffic to your website. YouTube is in this sense an irreplaceable marketing tool nowadays and its potential is staggering.
But that doesn’t mean that everyone who uploading videos on this platform will be successful. In this article, we will reveal you the secrets of understanding the potential of your video in order to guide you toward an effective YouTube marketing strategy.
“YouTube is the second largest search engine with a billion hours of video watched every day” – Hootsuite
Reporting is the key to success
Video making is one of the most demanding activity, in terms of costs and time, for a company. And for this reason, it is important to give value to the time spent on it, trying to accomplish the best possible results.
There is a simple effective way, that is often forgotten, to avoid wasting time on useless works: analyse, analyse and, again, analyse. Bunch of tools and integrations let you discover interesting insights regarding the performance of your videos, giving you the possibility to adjust your strategy and improve it.
For sure, YouTube Analytics is the first step to have an overview of your videos’ performance checking results out of the essential and most important KPI’s.
You can find it directly in your YouTube channel: it can tell you a lot about who your audience is, what they like, and what kind of content you should be creating to be successful.
But to get a more complete overview, not all of us know that it is possible to link our YouTube channel to Google Analytics. As a free tool to track website traffic, it offers an excellent integration to Youtube to discover how people are engaging with your channel.
How do I link Google Analytics to my Youtube channel?
The first step is the creation of a Google Analytics account and of a new property, declaring it as a website with the domain name being your official YouTube channel address.
At this point, you should be able to see and get your unique tracking code. Now open your channel settings and click the View Additional Features link. Click on Channel and then Advanced in the left-hand sidebar. Scroll down to the very bottom and paste the copied ID into the Google Analytics Property Tracking ID field.
Save the new settings… and that’s it. Your YouTube channel is now ready to be scanned and analysed in Google Analytics!
The advantages of Google Analytics tracking your YouTube channel
For companies that are using YouTube as an acquisition channel for their website, Google Analytics is an unmissable tool to add in your reporting process.
The famous Google tool will provide you with more detailed data and gives you the possibility to evaluate more aspects of your YouTube channel. You can both track users who visit your YouTube channel as well as users who visit your website from YouTube, getting information about what they do once they landed, how they engage with your content and how many conversions they bring. Isn’t that great?
This data will increase the quality of your reporting process, making it significantly more effective and useful for your marketing decisions. But there is even more! Let’s take a look at two of the extra insights you can get from Google Analytics.
Discover how users discover your YouTube channel
One of the main advantages of using Google Analytics is the possibility to track how users find your YouTube channel. To do this, set up a proper view, with the only filter on YouTube Traffic.
On the left, visit the “Acquisition” section. Select “All Traffic” and then the Source/Medium report. Google Analytics lists different traffic sources and can help you determine different ways to market your channel. Moreover, this view gives you the possibility to analyse the quality of sessions coming from these different channels with metrics like bounce rate, average session duration and, when enabled, the conversion rate.
That will allow you to manage and organize budget and effort based on the most effective source. For example, if sessions are coming from one specific social network it is worth to focus the attention on it
Which are the most effective links and videos
Google Analytics can show you which are the most clicked links in your YouTube Channel and which bring traffic on your website.
This is possible, by setting up UTM tracking tags to each link added on YouTube, which enables Google Analytics to tag specific sources of traffic. Since Google Analytics can’t tell you specifically the position of the link in your YouTube Channel, make sure to add the necessary details in the UTM tag in order to be able to recognise and associate that link to the video it is merged with. You can analyse them in Google Analytics in the Source/Medium report: here you need to type “youtube” in the search box to filter the first column to clicks only coming from YouTube.
Moreover, setting up specific goals in Google Analytics (for example: add an item to cart, purchase, etc) you could also tracking the conversions of users arriving in your website from YouTube, taking under control the real effectiveness of your marketing strategy. You only need to select the goal you want to analyse from the Conversions drop-down list, always in the Source/Medium report.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is a powerful marketing tool, that has to be used in any case when thinking about a new marketing strategy. Using it together with other analysis tools, such as YouTube Analytics, will really boost your way of creating content and interact with your users.
There are some best practices and rules to follow in order to get the most out of it but the setup process is easy and once you understand the functioning, a bunch of new doors will open for you and your company.