Tracking the Impact of Your YouTube Marketing
In her Social Media Examiner article “How to Analyze Your YouTube Marketing With Google Analytics,” Kristi Hines explores how to better track/measure the impact of your YouTube marketing efforts, namely with Google Analytics. Through Google Analytics you can obtain a clearer snapshot of how YouTube drives traffic to your site, as well as a better understanding of how people find and engage with your channel. If you want to put this into place, here are some key steps the author covered below.
Set Up Google Analytics for Your YouTube Channel
If you have ever tracked your website through Google Analytics, this process is very similar. You first need to create a new property in your Google Analytics account. This website link property is your YouTube channel URL. Once you have your Google Analytics tracking ID (look for“UA-,” and numbers), you need to go to your YouTube channel and access your Advanced Settings. At the bottom of this page, you’ll enter your Google Analytics tracking ID in the specified field.
Through Google Analytics, it will track visitors to your YouTube channel homepage and provide a breakdown of clicks on your channel tabs such as About, Discussion, Videos, and Playlist. Please note that while you will get all of this information through Google Analytics, you will still rely on YouTube for data on the actual videos.
Tracking YouTube Traffic
It’s important to know how much website traffic you’re getting from YouTube and Google Analytics can help you get this critical insight. If you want to enhance the effectiveness of this measure, add UTM parameters to most of the links on your YouTube channel and videos. That will make sure that every click from your channel and videos can be specifically linked to its source.
If you are looking to track traffic from each YouTube video within the Google Analytics platform, you’ll again use the UTM parameters with your video links. You can also incorporate short links (via the Bitly URL service) in the video description text or on the video, which can redirect the visitor to this new site. These URLs help Google Analytics understand exactly where the traffic originated from, whether it was from clicking on the description link or if it was manually typed into a browser bar.
Understanding Overall YouTube Traffic
Once your UTM parameter tagged URLs are set up, you will wait for clicks. If you aren’t sure if this is a hot spot or a dead zone, access the Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium report and then search for “youtube” to see your YouTube traffic. Then, use the Secondary Dimension drop-down list to add the Ad Content column, giving you an inside look into how everything is going. For example, you can check out YouTube traffic that came from your channel, your videos, and other providers’ channels/videos. You can also see what visitors are doing, such as if someone clicks a video description link or a channel profile link. You can also examine the conversion data to see what links actually seal the deal.
Moving Forward with YouTube And Google Analytics
When you pair together these two metrics, you can better understand how your YouTube channel drives traffic to your website and how people find and engage with it. If the numbers are telling a great story, keep focused and maintain this successful strategy, growing it along the same lines. However, if your numbers are lackluster, it’s time to map out something completely new that will get the results you want.
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References:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-analyze-your-youtube-marketing-with-google-analytics/?awt_l=1SkJ1V&awt_m=3fKcOveKG.r.ILT&omhide=true