How to Analyze Your YouTube Marketing With Google Analytics

Are you wondering how to optimize your YouTube Marketing With Google Analytics? YouTube is an irreplaceable marketing tool of our era and the single most efficient way to distinguish your brand from the crowd of rivals. Although blogs, infographics, social media, and other formats still play a major role in digital marketing, video remains crucial because of the sheer power of visual content.

According to the report, video content will make over 80% of the entire Internet traffic by 2021. The platform reaches more 18- to 34-year-old Americans than any TV network, while the number of YouTube channels earning six figures annually has increased by 40% year on year.

The figures are staggering, but does it really mean YouTube guarantees standout marketing performance? Not really.

Users who don’t measure the results of their activities can hardly understand the influence YouTube content has on the target audience. You need to analyze YouTube marketing and the easiest way to do it is through Google Analytics. In this article, we will show you how to do it in a few simple steps.

1.Create a Google Analytics Account

Since this is a step-by-step guide for YouTube marketers to analyze your YouTube marketing With Google Analytics, we need to begin with the basics. The first thing you need to do is create an account for your channel on Google Analytics. If you’ve ever created a website-focused account before, then you know how the process works.

Step number one is to make a new property within your existing Google Analytics profile.

When you do that, you need to declare this property a website with the domain name being your official YouTube channel address.

After that, you should be able to identify your unique tracking code in Google Analytics, which is almost always in the UA + random numbers format.

Once you’ve done that, go back to your YouTube account and paste the tracking ID to the very bottom of the Advanced Settings page.

Naturally, Google Analytics analyzes YouTube channels more or less the same as any other website on the Internet. This is why we need to mention that YouTube’s native analytics is still more powerful when it comes to video analysis. On the other hand, Google Analytics will help you to understand the following:

• Identify users who visit the official channel page on YouTube.
• Identify users who open a specific tab on this channel such as Playlists or Discussions. Do it by following Behavior → All Pages report.
• Learn how users found out about your YouTube page in the first place by following Acquisitions → All Traffic → Source → Medium report.
• Learn the geo-location of each user by following Audience → Geo → Location report.

2. Analyze Traffic Leading to Your Website

Now that you’ve set up the new property, you will have everything ready for the next segment of the YouTube analytics.

The first step is all about measuring the results of the YouTube channel as such, but the second phase helps you to analyze visits coming from YouTube to your main website. In other words, you can identify all YouTube referrals and count the number of sessions and new visitors.

This is exactly what companies like custom writing services need to know if they want to drive fresh conversions via YouTube, but the same principle goes for all other types of businesses, too.

However, referral analysis can only take you so far if you don’t invest more time and effort into YouTube analytics.

In other words, you won’t be able to determine important traffic-related information. For instance, it will be impossible to learn whether the link comes from your YouTube video, some other user’s video, your YouTube channel, and so on.

How come? What  is it that you are missing here? Well, you have to add UTM parameters to YouTube URLs to get the most of Google Analytics.

In general, UTM parameters have this format: utm_source=youtube.com.

To do that, you need to edit YouTube links and add UTM tags. This basically makes redirects look like affiliate links leading to your website, so you know exactly who comes to the site from your YouTube page.

3. Use UTM to Track Visits from Specific Videos

You can take Google Analytics even further by using the same UTM tag feature. The only (but very important) difference between the second and the third step is that the latter gives you more detailed information about website visitors. Instead of seeing referrals from your YouTube channel as a whole, you get to identify the content your audience has been consuming.

How is this possible?

The idea is simple – you can do it by adding UTM parameters to each one of your YouTube videos. One option is to insert annotations to your clips while they play, while the other one is to add UTM-powered links to video descriptions.

It’s an excellent lead generation mechanism because you enjoy the privilege of learning your followers’ interests and expectations. This is how you assess their position within the sales funnel and find a way to create a perfect offer for each prospect individually.

4. Analyze Total Traffic

Now that you’ve prepared every UTM tag, you can finally start analyzing YouTube-induced traffic. The total traffic report can be found in Acquisition → All Traffic → Source → Medium, but you need to look for YouTube referrals in particular.

Besides that, you probably want to distinguish between websites visits coming from your own YouTube channel or videos and visits coming from other YouTube pages. You can find it in the Ad Content column which is placed in the Secondary Dimension drop-down list. Visits coming from your content already have UTM tags, while other redirects will display the Not Set sign.

All those reports will help you to understand the effectiveness of your YouTube content and measure parameters such as leads, conversion rates, dwell times, and many others. Of course, you can always play with different links and set additional features in Google Analytics to learn even more about any given page or video.

Conclusion

YouTube is a powerful marketing tool, but you have to follow and measure your activities in order to figure out the performance of your channel. Google Analytics gives you more than enough options to do it, so we made this post to explain to you how to analyze YouTube marketing using this platform. Make sure to use our suggestions and leave a comment if you have other insights to share with our readers!

Justin Osborne is a writer at domywriting review, writing services and paper writing service, he loves to share his thoughts and opinions about education, writing and blogging with other people on different blogs and forums.