The watch time report mainly provides common statistics, such as watch time, audience retention rate, audience characteristics, playback position, traffic source and playback device. The watch time report records all user behaviors on the YouTube mobile application.
1. Watch time
YouTube defines watch time as the total number of minutes of watching videos. Among them, the average watch time is crucial, that is, the average length of time people watch videos. If YouTube creators want to improve the performance of their videos, they must optimize the top priority watch time, that is, they need to optimize the two key indicators of watch time: number of views and average watch time. For merchants, it is important to remember that content is king, and high-quality videos that can attract users to click and watch are the basis for improving performance.
2. Audience retention
The audience retention rate metric tracks the engagement of viewers over a period of time. Here you can find average watch time statistics, a list of the best performing videos, and a deep understanding of how videos stack up with other videos on YouTube.
3. Demographics
The YouTube Demographics report allows you to understand the age, gender, and geographic location of YouTube audiences, and can directly judge whether it matches the merchant’s goals, as shown in Figure 5-42.
On the “Audience Analysis” page, just click the “More” option and enter “Geography” to see the number of fans from various countries.
YouTube audience analysis can more accurately reach potential target users with targeted advertising content. Therefore, when merchants are looking for photographers to cooperate, try to obtain the profile data of each photographer and analyze the audience characteristics. If it is not possible to obtain, you can also use third-party YouTube analysis tools to view the audience characteristics of the photographer’s details page.
4. Playback locations
If you know where the video is played, you can clearly see how fans find the merchant’s video. Through the YouTube data analysis tool, you can find the total number of plays for each video playback location on the playback location page, where the playback locations are YouTube watch page, YouTube channel page, embedded external website and App, etc. From these data, you can know where the video is most popular, so as to optimize the YouTube video channel according to the actual situation.
5. Traffic sources
When analyzing the video audience, it is also important to accurately find out the source of fans. In the traffic sources of the YouTube data analysis tool, there are charts showing various traffic source channels, which can understand how users find the merchant’s video, as shown in Figure 5-46. If the video brings high-quality traffic through certain keyword searches on YouTube, then the video keywords can be further optimized. In this way, when users search for relevant keywords on YouTube, they can search for the merchant’s video to attract more views. If the merchant has obtained huge traffic from a certain channel, then the promotion investment in this channel can be increased, and similar channels can also be found for promotion attempts.
6. Playback devices
It is also important for merchants to know which devices the audience is using to watch videos. These indicators are distributed among mobile phones, computers, TVs, tablets, etc. Merchants can use this data to decide whether specific videos need to be optimized.