YouTube Video Analytics (under Overview) from “Bosses Hang (Godspeed You! Black Emperor Cover)” courtesy of Undercover Rabbis.
Engagement: This refers to the actions that viewers take beyond just watching the video, like taking the time to comment, like, share, subscribe, or bookmark for later. Engagement is often the most important metric for marketers to track, because it tells you how many people are interested enough in your content to take further action. Comments can paint a clear picture of how your content affected viewers. Shares gauge how much viewers value your video and your brand, and are crucial to growing a following. Likes and dislikes can help you evaluate what content did or did not work, and it further indicates to YouTube what content is likely to be high quality when recommending videos in users’ feeds.
Thumbnails: The thumbnail is the picture of your video that appears with the title on a results page or link. It provides a sneak peek of the content you’re sharing to help the viewer decide whether to watch it or not. A thoughtfully crafted thumbnail is easy to make and can have a big impact on how many viewers will ultimately choose to click and watch your video.
Title keywords: The keywords you use in your video title tells YouTube what’s in it, and helps guide viewers to your content when they search for similar words or phrases.
Re-watches: This metric measures the number of times viewers re-watch particular parts of your video. If there is a high re-watch rate, viewers are likely interested and invested in the topics you’re covering, and might want to know more. This can be useful for strategizing and planning future content.
Demographics: These stats account for the different types of viewers who are watching your content, segmented by gender, age, and geography.
It’s important to understand what these YouTube metrics are meant to measure. They all play an important part in your video rankings on both YouTube and Google, so it’s prudent to implement some basic best practices to keep these stats out of the gutter, as we’ll outline below. However, it’s important to keep your focus on the end goals, and not just chase the stats. Good metrics are to be used as indicators of your progress, not the goal in and of itself.
How Google ranks YouTube videos
YouTube views don’t only come from people already logged on to YouTube. Google is also a huge driver to your YouTube videos. Google needs to understand the content of your video in order to include it in search results. Google ranks YouTube content in the following ways:
- Crawling the video and extracting a preview and thumbnail to show the user
- Extracting meta tags and page texts from your video descriptions to tell the user more about the video’s content
- Analyzing the video sitemap or structured data to determine relevance
- Extracting audio to identify more keywords
Keywords aren’t pulled just from the text attached to your video in the descriptions and tags — they can also be pulled from the audio itself. This is why including the right keywords in your video script will help boost the video’s rankings on Google.
Choosing keywords is about relevance, not volume
This begs the question: what, then, are the “right” keywords? A better question might be: what makes a keyword the right one? Let’s return to the “YouTube is like an enormous library archive” analogy for a moment. If only making noise and getting noticed mattered, then the right keywords would be the ones that get the most search volume to attract the most viewers. But like we said, YouTube is too saturated a platform to count on viral spread. Search engines don’t really think in terms of “best and worst” videos to make their rankings. (Search engines don’t really think at all, but that’s a topic for another day.) Search engines are designed to identify “what video is best for this particular viewer, in this particular instance?” That’s not a question of volume or popularity. That’s a question of relevance.
It is rarely going to be an effective marketing goal to merely seek out lots and lots of viewers regardless of who they are. Most campaigns are better served by a smaller group of highly engaged fans than by millions of lukewarm passive viewers. If you spend all of your focus optimizing your content for Google’s bots, high volume and low engagement is what you’re likely to get. If you want to build a meaningful fan base, then you must build your content for the people watching it, not just the search engines ranking it.
Defining your audience and their needs
You must have a clear idea of who you are trying to address with your YouTube content if you want to know what to say to them. Defining your target audience first will make the SEO optimization process more goal directed and specific.
Identifying and defining your target audience can start with the motivations behind their video searches. Some common motivations include:
