The Guide to Auditing Your Youtube Channel

The Guide to Auditing Your Youtube Channel

Audits may not be the sexiest thing on the planet, but all of the optimization in the world would be for nothing if you can’t measure the success of your YouTube presence. Most people think it’s enough to just mentally keep track of things like subscribers and views, but the real masters of the platform perform deep audits on a regular basis.

Audits also give you an opportunity to step back from your content and take an objective look at what’s working and what’s not.

How Many Subscribers Are Watching Your Content?

Machinima, one of the leading channels for video game content on YouTube, has been the most consistent in branding and packaging it’s Youtube channel, and no doubt it has led them to garner over one million subscribers. Your brand will serve as a navigation marker in a sea of online content. Having a strong point of view within your content helps define your brand and position yourself as an expert and leader in your field.

Your number-one priority should be creating content that connects with your audience and provides value to them. The subscribers-to-views ratio can help you determine how well your content meets that goal.

Which Videos Have the Highest Audience Retention?

Home Depot’s videos are not just repurposed commercials. Instead, they offer DIY expertise and insight on products and projects around the home. By creating engaging content that is valuable to the specific DIY community, Home Depot is able stay on brand and increase their chance of satisfied viewers seeing their content as long as possible.

To find it in Creator Studio, go to Analytics > Watch Time Reports > Audience Retention. Below the graph that shows your overall channel’s audience retention, you can see the audience retention for individual videos including the percentage watched for each video on the far right.

By studying the videos that attain the highest audience retention, you can gauge which topics and styles perform best and repeat those in the future.

How Many Of Your Videos Are Searched?

Many people think optimizing for search simply means stuffing their titles full of keywords to get the video to rank. Following a formula can help you write keyword-rich titles that people still want to click. The formula uses the pattern shown in this video by Gillette. Start the title with a broad category (How to Shave). Then add your main keyword with a compelling reason to click (Shaving Tips for Men). If your video is for a brand, add the brand name at the end (Gillette).

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. It’s important to optimize your YouTube channel for search and track the effectiveness of your efforts in your audits. If a video performs especially well in search, the algorithm may rank your channel highly for that search term so creating more videos on that subject might be a good idea. Titles are only one element though. Don’t forget about others such as keywords, tags, playlists, descriptions, etc.

The questions I asked are only three of many others you could be asking while auditing your Youtube channel. When you audit and question your YouTube channel metrics on a regular basis, some ideas for improving performance and optimization will reveal themselves immediately. Other metrics and trends may take some time to interpret, and sometimes you may find things you were never looking for. You’ll never know until you look.