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.