YouTube expert reveals Analytics strategies to go viral

In this article I explain as a YouTube consultant what I look at on a clients channel, and what all the YouTube analytics mean.
So we can work on a content strategy.

Right YouTube Algorithm?

The first thing that I need to know is if their content is entertainment or educational.
Because this in large part determines which algorithm we are going to target, depending on how big the channel is.
Is it either Search or Home/Suggested.

If the channel is larger (let’s say 100K subs or more) then I’d always target Home & Suggested, and YouTube Search is a bonus.
Because the big views come from Home and Suggested.

But when a channel is just starting out, I’d target Search when it is in the educational niche.
Educational channels are the easiest to start for that reason, because if you target niche topics, it is pretty easy to get views, when you don’t have a lot of experience.
Learning keyword research is a pretty easy skill to learn.

Right traffic sources?

Now I know if we target the right YouTube algorithm, I want to know where the main part of the traffic comes from.
Because this tells me if my client indeed triggers the right algorithm.
But also if viewers get where they came for … I’ll explain later.

Search

When I look at the top search terms.
Are those search terms you actually targeted?
If not, why not?
If those unintended search terms are related to your niche, but you haven’t made videos about them, they are great video ideas.

Look at the average view duration of those individual search terms.
Do viewers watch the video or click away after a few seconds?
Because if viewer click away after a couple of seconds, viewers are not getting what they are coming for when they searched for that term.

Watched also

Where are viewers coming from before they watched this channel?

There are 3 related metrics:
1) card: “Channels that your audience watches”
2) card: “What your audience watches”
3) Suggested videos.

These metrics tell us what viewers are also interested in before they came to this channel.
If you haven’t made videos about these topics, you should definitely do that

Content buckets

I ask creators to create content buckets as groups in their YouTube Analytics.
There are 2 reasons for that:

1) This forces the creator to think in content buckets.
Realizing what content they make and that they should think about what content they make and why.
Because making content for the sake of making content is a very bad strategy.

2) This enables me to get some stats out of those content buckets.
Which content buckets works best?
    • I look at average views per video in that content bucket (I need to calculate that by hand)
    • I look at view to subscribe ratio for that content bucket (I need to calculate that by hand)
    • I look at view to unsubscribe ratio for that content bucket (I need to calculate that by hand)

I try ask myself why it works well? And ask the client why they think that is!
Is it thumbnails? Is it lack of competition? Is it the topic of the video?

In the analysis of a client I noticed that a particular content bucket did very well, but the view-to-subscriber ratio was below the 1%.
Which was significantly lower than other content.
That told me that people clicked, because they were interested but the content wasn’t valuable enough to stick around for.
This tells me that the topics of the videos are good for views, but we need to work on the information in the video itself.

Most valuable videos

Then I look at the most popular videos, and try to explain why that is.
Which videos generate (organically) most views
Which videos generate (organically) most subscribers?
Because thos are generally videos to make more of

View to subscriber ratio

Also for all videos I analyze the view to subscriber ratio.
Because these are valuable videos that make your channel grow.

Average view per viewer

This tells us if you channel is a black hole is for clicks.
Do viewers watch video after video?
This should be the case for an entertainment channel, but for a channel like my DJ channel, I have a much more flaky viewer base because it’s mainly targeted toward Search.

What content do subscribers UNSUBSCRIBE from
Now I’m curious as to why that is.

Viewer patterns

I look for abnormalities in Audience retention graphs to know what I need to work on with my client.
I look Average Percentage Viewed at 30 secs.

< 70% Than that is definitely something we need to work on.
70-80% ok
> 80% really good.

But I also look at patterns between videos. What stands out to me?

For example, I analyzed a channel of a client, that had audience retention graphs with a big drop on the beginning, but the rest of the graph was really flat.
This tells me: we have an expectation problem: most viewers don’t get what they came for.
But the viewers that stayed, thought it was an interesting video, because of the flat line.
This is either a thumbnail-problem or a hook-problem.
In this case it was both.

I can also analyze your channel.
You can book a call with me by clicking here.
When you are serious about YouTube and want to take it to the next level, take a look at my video training program: Viral Strategy.
The program takes you step-by-step through the process of getting views, subscribers and going viral.

For new creators I included a module that guides you step-by-step through the process of starting, creating and setting up a YouTube channel.