YouTube Channel Analyzer/Full Audit
Analyze YouTube channel performance, content, engagement, branding, optimization and growth potential
Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd largest social media channel in the world (after Facebook) so rather than just dumping your videos on there and forgetting about it, you should be taking advantage of its huge active user base together with its prominence in a search context – not just on YouTube itself but in Google search too.
What is a YouTube audit?
A YouTube audit is designed to give you an objective in-depth overview of the performance of your YouTube channel and videos. This is a great place to start for people who want to leverage YouTube but … don’t know where to start.
Performing a YouTube audit will give you clear action points and help you focus on fixing any glaring issues while baselining your performance.
A baseline is really about drawing a line in the sand. Once you have a baseline you’ll have a good idea of how many views are average per video, you’ll know average engagements, view lengths and other key stats.
Why audit your YouTube Channel?
A YouTube audit would most likely precede a YouTube strategy. This is especially important if you’re working with a client or stakeholder and need data to inform your strategy.
Without data, your strategy is based on intuition and opinion – which is fine but leaves you open to disagreement with other stakeholders. By basing your strategy on data insights, you’ll have a strong objective foundation that backs up your strategy.
It’s common for agencies or brand managers to audit their YouTube channels annually or half-yearly. Agencies can use the audit to track progress of KPIs and communicate to their client about how successful their strategy has been.
YouTube audits are also a great idea for finding things to fix or optimize. Especially if several people access your YouTube Studio account, it can be hard to determine who’s in charge of what and if anything has fallen through the cracks. An audit can reset everything and paint an accurate picture of where performance currently stands and what elements need urgent attention (for example: missing Tags on videos, non-optimized video descriptions or inconsistent use of video HashTags).
What does a YouTube Audit contain?
The two components of a YouTube Audit are:
1. YouTube Channel Audit
This involves systematically going through all the Channel details in YouTube Studio and analyzing each of these sections:
Channel layout, spotlight videos and featured sections: these options enable you to set up your channel visually based on the videos and playlists you currently have. Your current channel layout might not be the most optimal if it hasn’t been assessed for many months.
YouTube let’s you link to all your other social media channels and also let’s you add non-social links like your website, blog or other pages. These channel links are prominent at the top of your YouTube channel so use them to help drive traffic to your other online destinations.
2. YouTube Video Audit
The next obvious task is to audit your actual videos. Thankfully, YouTube’s Analytics tab shows great insights at an aggregate (across all videos) and let’s you drill into each video individually to see specific stats.
You should pay close attention to the following metrics:
Views: this is the most important YouTube metric. It refers to the total number of video views as determined by YouTube. Keep in mind, a ‘view’ is variable on YouTube. Unlike Facebook and Instagram which counts a view once someone has seen a video for at least 3-seconds. YouTube doesn’t work like this and instead counts views dynamically based on a number of criteria including video length, session details, user behavior, device and several other aspects.
Engagement: this is a group of metrics encompassing a number of very interesting aspects: such as overall watch time, average view duration on each video, the percentage of people still watching at 0:30 and video interactions such as likes, comments & shares. All these metrics shed light on how engaging the content is and whether viewers are sticking around or bouncing straight off.
Subscribers: this is a unique metric to YouTube but it’s effectively the same concept as Followers on a social channel like Instagram or Twitter. Gaining subscribers is important if your views come from YouTube itself. A channel with lots of subscribers has built-in viewership when you publish a new video. Now that YouTube is very Feed orientated, it’s in your best interests to encourage viewers to subscribe so they are more likely to see future videos in the Feed.
Traffic sources: this metric breaks down where your viewers are watching your videos. The most likely places are on YouTube itself (website and app) after performing a search but there are several other places too such as the video embedded on a website, watching the video on a Smart TV or PVR or having the video be recommended in the Home or Explore tabs.