YouTube Business Analytics: Ambitious Creators Should Follow 4 Steps! (It's Important)

Are you confused every time you sit down at the computer, open YouTube Studio, and stare at the analytics feature?

It’s hard to make a decision when you can’t interpret the stats YouTube provides. For some of you, it might be challenging to read the stats because looking at numbers and graphs can become boring and overwhelming.

Unfortunately, if you want to succeed on YouTube, you MUST observe these stats every week; otherwise, you will fail to grow faster.

You have two options as a creator:

a. Continue the same process of misunderstanding YouTube’s analytics and hope that you’ll start growing… (*spoiler* you usually won’t!)

b. Find new ways to organize your data to ensure that success becomes a guarantee.

Why not take the path that is guaranteed to get you results?

If you’re trying to turn YouTube into a profitable business, you must understand how to read, interpret, and make the best data-driven decisions from these four key business analytics steps.

If you learn how to use these steps to your advantage, you will…

1. Watch your stats in YouTube Studio 10X!
2. Completely organize your decision-making process.
3. Start thinking of ways to systemize your content creation strategy by understanding key business data.

Step 1: Identify Your Descriptive Analytics

Let’s analyze a common problem we see most YouTube channels struggle with...

Click-Through Rates.

(Go to: Analytics > Reach > Last 28 days > Select “Last 365 days”)

Typically, you want your overall 365-day click-through rate to be steady and in the 4% range. When you’re starting out on YouTube, you will typically get inflated click-through rate percentages until you start growing a bigger audience.

As your audience grows, the overall click-through rate will steadily drop to a single-digit number.

If you want to fully understand your YouTube business analytics, you must understand why your videos are either underperforming or overperforming.

Let’s say you’re below 4%...

To improve this number, you would need to understand why your click-through rate percentages are so low. The first step would involve figuring out what is causing fewer people to click.

This is where Descriptive analytics come into play…

We need to look into the past and present actions you were taking to identify the actions that are leading you to either get higher or lower click-through rates.

For example, if you were designing thumbnails with difficult-to-see facial expressions or text, many viewers would decide to scroll past the video.

However, if you designed thumbnails that were clickbait (in the right way) with simple colors, easy-to-see facial expressions, short text, and eye-catching figures, your click-through rate would be higher than 4%.

Once you determine this, you can come up with a conclusion that determines the “why” to your problem.

Example descriptive analytics analysis: “I am getting a 2.5% click-through rate in the last 365 days, meaning that I need to figure out how to fix my thumbnails and titles to ensure that more viewers will want to click the video.”

You can apply this strategy to any stat within YouTube:

• Subscribers
• Views
• Watch time
• Revenue
• Average view duration
• Audience retention

Step 2: Identify Your Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is what is likely to happen and why.

Once you have a decent amount of content uploaded to YouTube, you can easily come to conclusions about the current status of your channel to make sure you have the most desirable stats.

If you see that your click-through rate is garbage, you will come to the conclusion that you need to update the thumbnail and titles. Otherwise, the channel will continue to either decline or plateau.

This is a very simple step that any of you can complete with ease. Please don’t overthink it.

Step 3: Identify Your Discovery Analytics

This is where you look for important data and find interesting patterns so you can combine the data together to understand what is going on with your content.

One of the most important business analytic YouTube tools offered in Studio is the “Impressions and how they led to watch time” tool.

(Go to: Analytics > Reach > “Impressions and how they led to watch time”)

This tool can tell us how engaging our content is with one simple graph:

Let’s say you create a video that gets low click-through rates, low impressions, and low views.

This could be caused by poor titles, thumbnails, hooks, or the content being underwhelming.

If your videos are getting low click-through rates, high impressions, and massive amounts of views, this could mean that you’re creating engaging videos that are appealing to broader audiences.

This usually happens to popular channels that get massive amounts of views (example: PewdiePie.)

Now, let’s say that you are getting high click-through rates, low impressions, and low views. This means that the content is great, but the appeal is narrowed down to a specific audience.

YouTube surfaces these videos to specific niches instead of to broader audiences.

What if we had high click-through rates, high impressions, and high views?

This sometimes happens, but it never usually does. It’s impossible to get a perfect video.

With all of these patterns in YouTube Studio, we can come to a conclusion and make an excellent judgment on how our channels are performing and how to improve.

Finally, we must take all of the information we gathered to create “prescriptive analytics” to create the best business analytics YouTube breakdown for ourselves.

Step 4: Identify Your Prescriptive Analysis

Quite simply, prescriptive analytics tell us what actions we should be taking to grow on YouTube. We need to take all three previous steps (descriptive, predictive, and discovery) to turn it into a prescriptive analysis.

Assuming that we’re trying to improve our click-through rates, impressions, and views, we would need to take action steps that could guarantee success in these three areas.

Here are three action steps you can take to improve in these areas:

1. Start learning how to create better thumbnails and titles.
2. Define your target audience very clearly. This will help create a laser-focused path towards your first 100k subscribers.
3. Study your audience retention graphs very closely.

(Credit: Tim Schmoyer)

Conclusion

If you’re a regular creator a business owner, YouTube business analytics can take you to the next level if you understand and implement them correctly.

It’s not hard to do, and it just takes a little bit of time and effort to gather up all the information to make the right judgments.

Here are the four steps to grow your YouTube channel using business analytics:

• Step 1: Identify Your Descriptive Analytics
• Step 2: Identify Your Predictive Analytics
• Step 3: Identify Your Discovery Analytics
• Step 4: Identify Your Prescriptive Analysis

And if you feel unconfident about this whole process and want a completely organized guide, don’t worry.

Click the red button down below, and we will guide you along the way to ensure you don’t get stuck as you sprint towards your first silver plaque.

We’ll hold your hand along the way to ensure that you get straight to the point and hassle-free guidance from our team.