Music is the most popular category that people like to watch on Youtube, followed by Entertainment (15%) and People & Blogs (11%). This is good news for musicians and bands who can use it to their advantage. The best thing about YouTube is equality – anyone, anywhere can be a YouTube star!
In our previous articles we discussed some tips for musicians about using social media for your advantage. Here we will evaluate a video - Navin Kundra - published by us on YouTube sometime back as we evaluate and discuss the benefits of using YouTube's statistics.
Once you have uploaded the video on YouTube, you can come back anytime to look at the statistics with YouTube Analytics tool. To access it, sign into your YouTube account and look up right next to the search bar and from the drop down menu select 'Analytics'.
Estimated Minutes Watched and Likes
Once you have uploaded the video on YouTube, you can come back anytime to look at the statistics with YouTube Analytics tool. To access it, sign into your YouTube account and look up right next to the search bar and from the drop down menu select 'Analytics'.
It will take you to an Overview page, where it lists an overall performance of your channel and the Top 10 videos with Views, Estimated Minutes Watched and Likes.
You can use this page to get a quick overview of the performance of your channel. It is especially useful when you are uploading multiple videos regularly. You can keep track of the popular and unpopular videos from this page itself and then use it to access more detailed analysis of the particular video in question.
Once you scroll down, you can access a few more statistics about the Demographics of your audience, how your video is being discovered and where your viewers are coming from.
Video Performance
After clicking on a video (from the Top 10 videos list), you can view its performance in detail. How many views it has had (in this case 7,003 till date), how many minutes it has been watched (22,877 mins), subscribers you had to your channel through this video and how the particular video engaged viewers. You can further click on any of the boxes and access more results.
If you are a band, you might be interested in learning where your audience lies. This is a good way to understand their likes and dislikes. You could use these statistics to plan your marketing strategy. Let's again consider the experiment video in question and look at the statistics below.
When I look at these statistics, I can see that majority of the audience lies in UK and USA, followed by Canada, Singapore and Germany. It also tells us that 11.4% of viewers viewed the video through embedded links on other websites. The interesting statistic for me is the other unknown element – 'YouTube watch page', which means nearly half of the viewers searched for it on YouTube, who were probably repeat viewers familiar with the title and knew what they were looking for.
Now let's look at the sidebar options. There are more options that let you categorise your reports further. Clicking on 'Views' opens up some more results.
Audience Retention
More than half the views here are from UK followed by USA and Canada. However, the 'Estimated Minutes Watched' and 'Average View Duration' for the video shows that the UK and US viewers were dissuaded faster than the Canadian viewers of the video. This is established through another statistic 'Likes and dislikes'.
'Audience Retention' link let's us have a quick look at the average amount of time the entire video or a particular moment in the video is being watched (includes rewind views). In this case the video is being watched for 3:24 minutes, that is 69% of the video length, which is quite a good thing.
Demographics
By clicking the Demographics link, you can access some more interesting statistics – compare between the Male and Female demographics and also the average age of viewers. Here, the video was watched by almost an equal number of male (48%) and female (52%) viewers. However, the single largest target audience appears to be female viewers in 13-17 years age group. Thus we can say that the video was immensely popular amongst younger female audiences.
If we look further down at 'Top Locations by Views', we can see that UK, the most popular location with the number of views has 0% female viewers in the 13-17 years age group, which coincidentally forms the largest chunk of viewers. This could be due to a difference in culture where teen girls don't usually associate themselves with this kind of music or perhaps a lack of proper advertising to the right audiences.
The average number of 'Likes' received when compared to the number of views from UK and US viewers is lesser than the 'Likes' received from Canada, considering that far lesser viewers viewed it there.
Perhaps if the video was publicised more to Canadian audiences, it would have done even better there. This is just one way how YouTube statistics can help you identify your problems and also offer a solution to overcome it.
If you are seriously looking to promote your music, apart from all the publicity you can gather and places you can play; YouTube statistics offer a real eye-opening proof of your talents and its feasibility. Also, it gives you a much bigger target audience to experiment with than any other video hosting service – YouTube is the 3rd most popular website after Google and Facebook and its search bar ranks 2nd right after Google.
Can you really afford to miss out on such an opportunity to know more about your audience and their behaviour? I hope not! Use the YouTube 'Analytics' tool to understand your audience and communicate with them.
Shubhit S., Epik Music Videos
22/04/2013