Combining hub pages for key topics and keywords with a well-planned internal linking can be a very effective SEO strategy.
It helps to ensure that, when you are creating content around a topic regularly, that you can rank consistently for the relevant keywords.
I’m going to use examples from Mail Online which, by some accounts, is the most visited English-language newspaper site on the web. That doesn’t mean it’s the best – far from it – but it does provide a useful subject for this post.
Mail Online recently started using hub pages on a consistent basis for many of its most popular topics, though not for all.
This gives us an opportunity to see what effect this has had. So here I’ll look at the strategy for two topics, and an example of what happens when you don’t do this.
Hub pages: what are they and why do you need them?
In this context, a hub page is a page themed around a certain topic or keyword. It could be a tag page, like this for SEO, or perhaps a category page.
Sites which produce a lot of content around the same topic often end up competing with themselves for search positions.
This is especially true with news articles, as in the New York Times example here. News articles are generally brief and will come and go in the search rankings. However, linking them to a hub page helps signal to Google that this is the page that should rank for a particular keyword or term.
To demonstrate how this works, here are some examples from Mail Online.
Search term ‘Chelsea News’
Mail Online had no hub page strategy of any kind until recently. Dan Barker (@danbarker on Twitter) pointed this out recently, and estimates that Mail started this strategy around October 25 last year.
This means we can get a before and after picture looking at the effects of this tactic.
Here, we have the search results for the entire Daily Mail domain for the search term ‘Chelsea News’. This is news related to Chelsea football club, a relatively popular search in the UK.
We can see that it started returning results for this hub page from November 7. It has also implemented pages for other English football teams.
This page has existed before, though its search performance was inconsistent until November 7 last year.
This chart shows the rankings for that page, and we can see a consistent (and higher) search ranking from November onwards.
The difference is the internal linking strategy.
The article screenshot below (article is from May 2015) shows the opportunities to link to the hub page which were missed.
This next screenshot shows the new strategy. In this article from December 2015, links lead back to the Chelsea team page (the hub page).
This is the Daily Mail team page. As well as internally linking from each article the site is now using the different elements on the page.
For example, team logos and live tables are now linking back to the individual team landing pages.
Search term: ‘David Cameron’
This is the Daily Mail view for the search term David Cameron:
Like the previous example, the rankings are inconsistent and many different pages are returned by Google for the term in the six month period shown.
That is until early November, when the hub page takes over. Since then, the performance of this David Cameron landing page has improved significantly.
There have been a couple of blips since November, perhaps due to inconsistent implementation of the linking strategy, but the page is performing much more effectively.
Again, the difference is between using internal linking effectively, and missing the chance to link, as shown in this article from August 2015.
Now, the Mail Online’s editors have learned to use internal links (perhaps there was some internal training back in October) and news articles and opinion pieces about Cameron all link back to the hub page.
The Telegraph: internal linking as it should be
Of course, Mail Online has been slow to realise the value of internal linking (I raised this back in 2014) compared to some other news sites.
For example, The Telegraph has used linking correctly for some time, and this is reflected in the performance for its David Cameron landing page.
Its hub page ranks consistently for the term because it has linked from all its Cameron articles for some time.
This means that the Telegraph and The Guardian (which also knows what to do with links), are the only news sites to rank on page one of Google for the term with their landing pages.
Mail Online: inconsistent internal linking
Although the Daily Mail are now internally linking and using hub pages, the site isn’t doing it for every search term (or hasn’t rolled out the strategy across all of its sections yet).
This underlines the impact that effective internal linking can have, used along with dedicated hub pages.
For example, celebrity news brings in lots of traffic for Mail Online, and it writes about any vague ‘news’ linked to celebrities.
However, very few celebrities have landing pages as yet. For example, Jennifer Lopez.
As a result, the Mail’s rankings for this search term are up and down and return 55 different URLs in the six month period shown below.
As the previous examples have demonstrated, with a J-Lo landing page and the right links, the site could rank consistently and bring in even more traffic.
In summary
Mail Online creates and publishes huge quantities of articles about celebrities and news. With each of these articles they gain thousands of links and social shares from their readers.
While each new article performs relatively well in search, they do so for a limited time only. Ss the article becomes old, positions drop until the original article is usurped by a new article, and so on.
These examples show how effective the use of linking and hub pages can be, and demonstrate its value, especially for sites that produce a lot of content around the same themes.
They also demonstrate how quickly sites can achieve results with this strategy. In the Mail Online’s case, it seem to have taken Google just over a week to view the links and return the intended page for the search terms.
This strategy, implemented across a range of keywords, enables sites to rank more consistently for a broad range of search terms, with obvious beneficial effects on traffic.
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Growing a following on social is easy, but harnessing the trust and vocal support of individuals and the collective community is lot more challenging. As evident through the power of earned media, word of mouth is the most important component of a consumer’s relationship with a brand. This means community building and an advocacy strategy should be essential components of any organization.
As the Community Outreach Manager at Sprout Social, I’ve focused almost entirely on building relationships through fostering community. I’ve achieved this by creating #SproutChat, our weekly Twitter chat, through connecting with groups on social channels and adding value to industry threads in forums. Over the past several years, incredible Sprout users worldwide have raised their hands, shared their stories and voiced their ideas. They have made, and continue to make, our community incredibly strong and valuable.
Building on this momentum, we’re thrilled to announce a brand-new initiative: Sprout Social All Stars. We understand the benefits of collaborating to advance the industry, that’s why we’ve curated a group of experts on the Sprout Social platform who are leaders in social media and digital engagement to help tell our story and theirs.
Our All Stars are vital extensions of the Sprout brand and will be sharing advice and content on a wide-range of topics. They’ll help us announce product updates and Sprout news, offer insider tips on how to harness and interpret actionable analytics, share best practices for providing phenomenal social customer care and contribute ideas on how to build a sustainable social strategy.
All of our advocates can be identified by Sprout’s new All Star badges.
Soon, you’ll begin to see us collaborate with these individuals through #SproutChats, webinars, speaking gigs and local market events. As we harness the knowledge and expertise of our Sprout All Stars and, together, provide additional value, we encourage you to get to know our inaugural participants.
We hope to expand our All Stars program in the future to include more Sprout supporters. Stay tuned for additional involvement opportunities. As always, we would love to see you at our weekly #SproutChat or at an in-person event. Have questions about Sprout’s customer advocacy program? Email us at allstars@sproutsocial.com.
The unique thing about bloggers is that most aren’t looking to earn an income when they’re first getting started. It’s simply a natural expression of their passion and desire to share their knowledge or solve others’ problems.
But there comes a point for most bloggers when they start to think, “I’ve got a good number of people reading my blog. I really enjoy writing. I wonder if I can make money at this?”
The most effective way to monetize your blog is through email marketing. For starters, it’s highly personal – people have to opt-in to receive your emails, which means they are expressly saying, “I want your emails.” Plus, email marketing is more effective in converting customers than other marketing channels, including social media and search engine marketing.
Monetizing your blog isn’t difficult and it doesn’t have to be intimidating either. Here are three steps you should follow to begin monetizing your blog today.
Step 1: Determine what “product” you want to sell.
If you already have something to sell, great! You’re ahead of the game. Skip to the next section. If not, keep reading.
To begin monetizing your blog using email marketing, first you need something to sell.
Now, you may be thinking, “Duh! Isn’t that obvious?” And you’d be right. But for many bloggers, this can be the hardest step.
Finding something to sell doesn’t have to be intimidating. Providing the knowledge from your blog in a different form is a simple way to start finding something to sell.
Here are several examples of “products” you can sell as a blogger:
Services
Providing a service can take your expertise to the next level. For example, if you have a fitness blog where you share all of the latest and greatest ways to trim the fat and get fit, you could consider offering coaching services over the phone or online. This adds another dynamic to who you are and what you can offer.
Bonus: You can also offer others’ services as part of an affiliate program (like the AWeber affiliate program) and promote that on your blog. Just make sure whatever affiliate service you represent is relevant to your expertise and existing audience and is something you use and are passionate about.
eBooks
You’ve already spent hours pouring over engaging blog posts, so there’s absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel. Simply turn your most popular posts into an ebook or an ebook series.
For example, Running Shoes Guru packages and sells three of its ebooks to subscribers and website visitors.
Courses
Courses can take various forms, including email courses, video courses, live courses and more.
As with ebooks, you could get your ideas for courses from your most popular blog posts or even from readers’ comments or questions. Are there common themes? What skills do you have that others can benefit from in this type of format?
The course could be something they log into or they buy as a DVD or series of DVDs. Whatever format you decide, it can be an effective way to generate revenue from your blog.
For example, singing coach Felicia Ricci, offers a free signing course, and sells a full course to her free course participants.
Memberships
Creating a membership program is a fun way to create a following and generate revenue. These programs provide members with exclusive incentives and discounts, something you don’t offer anywhere else.
An example of this would be Chris Ducker’s Youpreneur community, where he provides exclusive content, coaching and more to fellow entrepreneurs struggling with the challenges of becoming an entrepreneur.
Live Workshops
Your audience has connected with your blog content. A great next step would be to allow them to connect with you personally through a live workshop.
These can be especially effective if you have a local audience, where you can hold local workshops. But you can also do these workshops in the form of a webinar, blab or Google Hangout.
Photography blogger Courtney Slazinik runs a live workshop where she teaches up-and-coming photographers how to take better photos.
Step 2: Build an email list with valuable content.
Now that you have something to sell, you need people to sell it to.
Many bloggers make the mistake of trying to sell their services, courses, workshops and more exclusively on their blog and social media. But the truth is most people aren’t ready to buy the first time they arrive on your blog or see your pin, “gram” or Facebook post.
Email marketing is a way to invite your readers to continue the conversation until eventually they are ready to buy.
Your first step with email marketing is building an email list of subscribers.
The key to building an email list is the same as blogging – you need to provide value. Luckily as a blogger, you’ve got this covered – you’ve already been providing value on your blog.
Start building your email list with your blog readers. They’re your best potential buyers because they already value the content you provide.
Invite your readers to sign up to receive the latest updates from your blog, or offer another incentive for signing up. Many of the examples I shared of things you could sell can also be used as incentives, but here are a few other examples of incentives you can offer:
Templates
Checklists
Webinars
Videos
Step 3: Use email autoresponders to nurture and sell.
With something to sell and subscribers coming into your email list, you’re ready to monetize your blog with email marketing. And you do that through emails autoresponders (aka email automation).
Autoresponders are a series of emails that are automatically sent to your new subscribers after they subscribe, saving you time and effort so you can keep your focus on your passion.
The first email in your autoresponder series is your welcome email. If you offered an incentive upon sign up, this is typically when you would deliver it. Your welcome email is also the first email your subscribers receive from you, so it should set the tone for the types of emails your subscribers can expect from you.
Your welcome email may also be your best opportunity to make a sell because welcome emails on average have the highest engagement rates of any email you send your subscribers. Be sure to introduce them to your product and encourage them to purchase.
Expand upon your welcome email with a welcome series. All additional autoresponder emails should continue to provide value to your readers. For example, if you’re a wellness coach, your welcome series could share top blog posts, more about you and your business, a survey of your subscribers to learn more about them and their interests, and more.
If you’re offering multiple incentives, which means multiple autoresponder series, you can link them together into one autoresponder series once each of the other series concludes. This allows you to continue the conversation further.
Pro Tip: Use email autoresponders after your readers have made a purchase to continue the relationship you have with them. Add additional “products” you can sell to your buyers. The best business is repeat business!
Tools to make monetizing easy.
Now, a note on the more technical side of monetizing your blog: how to handling transactions.
There are a ton of e-commerce solutions on the market. One of the great advantages of these services is that many of them integrate with email marketing service providers like AWeber.
By connecting or integrating your ecommerce solution with your ESP, you can automatically add customers to your list and continue to nurture your relationship and attract repeat business.
Monetizing your blog is easy with email marketing.
Monetizing your blog is easier than you might expect with the help of email marketing. By determining what you can sell, building your list, and using relevant autoresponder emails, you’ll be able to keeping your focus on your blog and passion.
How are you monetizing your blog? Share in the comments below.
This article was originally published on our sister site ClickZ, but it’s so helpful we thought we’d share it here too.
Another week, another Facebook feature. Over the past few years, declining organic reach has become a major issue for publishers using Facebook.
While this is partly a rod we’ve made for our own backs due to our ravenous search for ever-increasing ‘Likes’, it’s good to see the platform launching tools that are specifically designed to combat this.
I thought I’d check out the new Audience Optimization Tool and see how – and if – it can help get my superbly crafted* social media messages to a wider audience
*If you use the word ‘crafted’ to describe your marketing messages, you should probably go home and have a long hard think about your life. Your business will be better off without you.
This all seems easy enough, although in practice the instructions are rather poorly written. If I currently head to settings then I won’t actually see ‘Audience Optimization for Posts’ if I have more than 5,000 ‘Likes’.
Facebook explains that the feature will automatically be turned on for larger pages, but it would be more useful/make more sense if all pages could at least see the option.
To be honest, Facebook has a long history of writing confusing guides though, so let’s chalk it up to experience and move on. Here’s how to turn the feature on if you have less than 5,000 ‘Likes’:
Head to your settings.
Under the ‘General’ heading, select ‘Audience Optimization for Posts’ and turn feature on.
You’re ready to roll.
Again, the confirmation language is slightly odd, implying that you may have actually restricted your audience, although this is not actually the case.
Now let’s try posting something.
Oddly, this feature is not yet available inside Business Manager, or for posts that are created using the Power Editor. I’m going to assume that there are two reasons for this.
Firstly, posts created in Power Editor have CTAs built in, and are generally designed to drive traffic directly to a site.
By limiting this, Facebook is clearly encouraging you to create posts that work within Facebook’s walled garden. Essentially, use this if you want reach and engagement, but not if you’re looking for traffic. Secondly… Facebook may just be tired of no one knowing how to use Power Editor properly, and have decided not to swim against the tide.
Add a link as you normally would, and then select the small ‘Crosshairs’ icon underneath to add ‘Interest Tags’. Essentially these are just the old Interest categories, but according to Facebook they operate in exactly the opposite way.
In the past, interest targeting would restrict the audience that could view your post.
While this option is still available, here Facebook promises that interests will help surface relevant posts to a wider organic audience, although whether this presents your posts to users who have not yet ‘Liked’ your page, or simply adds yet more jiggery-pokery to the algorithms of existing fans is not revealed.
I’m testing this from Search Engine Watch’s Facebook page (what do you mean you aren’t a fan? Hop to it!), so I’ve rather obviously chosen ‘Search Engine Optimisation as a category.
Facebook tells me that the potential audience is a massive 19,870,820, although obviously there are differing levels of value and actual interest there.
Once you’ve chosen your first category Facebook will also serve up some suggestions. This may be me, but again, these seem strangely worded.
‘Web Banner’ seems like a weird thing to be interested in, but I would assume these are based on the stated interests of users. I play it safe and choose ‘Social Media Optimization’ and ‘Digital Marketing’ as secondary categories.
Hit ‘Publish’ and away you go.
So… did it work?
SEW has just over 37,000 fans on Facebook, and based on the time of posting (10am GMT on a Friday), I’d expect a low organic reach of about 300 users initially. I waited a few hours and checked back at 3pm to find… my post had reached 380 people.
So initially, no more or less than I’d have expected. There are of course any number of reasons this didn’t resonate with users.
I deliberately toned down the copy a little, although the content itself was very appealing (go read the post if you don’t believe me). It was early on a Friday – typically a slow day – and it’s possible this may increase once our US audience comes online later in the day.
I’m going to sit on the fence on this one, and guess that the low reach difference is down to how new the feature is. Facebook is obviously not going to show my post to every user on the first attempt, although I’m going to make the correlation that this feature does only reach existing fans.
It’s clearly designed as an engagement tool, which can only be a good thing, but I’d think carefully about your business goals before regularly using this.
I’d be fascinated to hear if you are seeing different results from this tool, and I’ll be sure to post an update in a month or two to see how results develop.
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Are you using YouTube to upload and share videos as part of your social media strategy? If so, you need to know who’s watching and how you can increase views and engagement.
Your content strategy is about more than just numbers, but the key to building a successful YouTube Channel requires you to understand who your audience is and how they’re engaging with your content. That’s where YouTube Analytics comes in.
YouTube Analytics can tell you a lot about your audience, including who they are, what they like and what kind of content you should create. To help you improve your overall video strategy, we’ve created a guide so you can better familiarize yourself with YouTube Analytics.
YouTube Analytics: General Reports
To access your analytics, visit http://youtube.com/analytics, or log into your account and follow these steps:
Click on your account icon and select Creator Studio.
On the left side of the screen, select Analytics.
You’ll notice YouTube Analytics are divided into a few different categories: Overview, Realtime, Earnings, Watch Time and Engagement. We’ll look more closely at each one below:
The Overview Report
The Overview report is a high-level summary of how your content is performing on YouTube across the last 28 days. This is one of the most important sections for businesses because it provides you with demographic data for your audience. This data is critical to ensuring your target audience is being reached. Geography in particular is important, especially for local businesses, as roughly four out of five YouTube views will come from other nations besides the US.
Overview also provides you with an at-a-glance look at performance metrics, such as watch time, views and earnings, as well as engagement metrics like comments, shares, likes, dislikes and favorites. It’s really just a glimpse at your overall performance. We’ll take a closer look at each of these areas shortly.
The Realtime Report
YouTube’s Realtime report shows you an estimate of view data for your last five videos, giving you insight into the performance of your recently published content. Based on this data, you might decide to change up your promotion strategy. If something is under performing, maybe you’re not doing enough cross-promotion on your other channels or your targeting is off.
The Realtime report will show you two graphs: hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute. The first is available for a sliding window of two days, while the latter is available for a sliding window of one hour. Both graphs refer to the local time zone of the viewer.
YouTube Analytics: Earnings Reports
If you’re a YouTube Partner with an associated AdSense account, you’ll have access to a couple additional reports around your earnings.
Earnings-related details at channel and video levels.
Ad earnings.
Earnings derived from transactions, like paid content and Fan Funding.
Earnings derived from YouTube Red.
Noteworthy metrics:
Ad Earnings: The total estimated earnings (net revenue) from all Google-sold advertising sources for the selected date range and region.
Earnings: The total estimated earnings (net revenue) from all Google-sold advertising sources as well as from non-advertising sources for the selected date range and region.
Red Partner Revenue: The total estimated revenue earned from YouTube Red subscriptions for the selected report dimensions. It reflects earnings from both music and non-music content.
The Ad Performance Report
The Ad Performance report provides you with data on gross revenue, estimated monetized playbacks, CPMs and ad impressions for the ads that run on your content. Businesses can use this report to determine how different ad types are performing over time compared to one another.
Noteworthy metrics:
Gross Revenue: The estimated gross revenue, in USD, from all Google-sold or DoubleClick-partner-sold advertising for the selected date range and region.
Impression Based CPM: The estimated gross revenue per thousand ad impressions.
Impressions: The number of verified ad impressions served.
Monetized Playbacks: The number of instances when a viewer played your video and was shown at least one ad impression. A monetized playback is counted if a viewer is shown a preroll ad but quits watching the ad before your video ever starts.
Playback Based CPM: The estimated gross revenue per thousand playbacks.
YouTube Analytics: Watch Time Reports
The best thing you can do as a creator is make videos that people will want to watch. Success requires a holistic approach, and watch time alone shouldn’t be the only metric you track. Under this category of reports, you’ll find more information on audience retention, demographics, playback location, traffic and devices.
The Watch Time Report
The Watch Time report collects data from YouTube.com, the embedded player and mobile YouTube apps to give you better insight into watch time and views. You can use the tabs under the graph to filter the data by content type, geography, date, subscription status, YouTube product and subtitles.
You can also see or compare data for specific videos, use unique cookies to estimate individual viewers, see data by type of viewer or location, view by most-watched date or change the range or time metric.
Noteworthy metrics:
Average View Percentage: The average percentage of a video watched during a video playback.
Average View Duration: The average length, in seconds, of video playback.
Estimated Minutes Watched: The number of minutes that users watched videos for the specified channel, content owner, video or playlist.
Uniques: The number of unique viewers that watched a video. This is calculated based on the number of unique cookies and will overcount users who are using multiple devices or browsers.
Viewer Percentage: The percentage of viewers who were logged in while watching the video or playlist.
Views: The number of legitimate views for your channels or videos.
Watch Time: The amount of time that a viewer has watched a video.
The Audience Retention Report
The Audience Retention report gives you an overall measure of how well your video keeps its audience. It’s a great way to see how much of your video your viewers are watching before leaving. If this number is lower than you thought, it might be time to change the way you make your videos or freshen up the content.
Also in this report is an interactive map that shows where your video has been watched. The darker areas mean that people in that location are watching longer than those in lighter areas.
You can use the Audience Retention report in a couple of different ways. For starters, the absolute audience retention curve lets you see which parts of the video are most popular. YouTube recommends paying close attention to the first 15 seconds of every video because that’s when viewers are most likely to drop off. You can also use relative audience retention to see how your video compares to YouTube videos of similar length.
You can also view audience retention by organic traffic, traffic for paid skippable video ads and traffic for paid display ads.
Noteworthy metrics:
Organic Traffic: Video views that are the direct result of user intention. Traffic is considered organic if a viewer takes an action like searching for a video, clicking on a suggested video or browsing a channel.
Skippable Video Ad: Views for ads that are auto-played before a video and that viewers can skip after five seconds.
Display Ads: Views in which the user played the video from a display ad, including ads shown in search results or on other video watch pages.
The Playback Locations Report
The Playback Locations report is particularly interesting if you work with collaborators or partners. This report shows you where your videos are being played. For instance, you can see how many views are generated through embedded videos on other websites and on youTube directly. And if it was viewed on YouTube, you can determine whether it was viewed from the video’s specific page or directly on a channel’s page.
Essentially, playback reporting is where users are viewing your videos, while the traffic sources is how people find your content. We’ll explain traffic sources next, but here’s a great video to differentiate the two.
Noteworthy metrics:
YouTube Watch Page: The video was watched on YouTube from the video’s specific page. It’s the exact URL where you can watch the video on YouTube.
YouTube Other: Certain browsers don’t let YouTube detect where on the platform the video was viewed. Most likely these views occurred on the YouTube watch page.
Embedded in External Websites and Apps: How often viewers watched your video when embedded on another website or app that embeds your videos.
The Traffic Sources Report
Another key report to keep an eye on is the Traffic Sources report. It shows the sites and YouTube features that viewers used to find your content. Knowing whether viewers are searching directly on YouTube, clicking Suggested Videos thumbnails or following links from social networks will let you know if your content strategy is working.
Traffic sources include:
YouTube search
Suggested videos
Browse features
Playlists
YouTube channels
YouTube advertising
Video cards and annotations
Notifications
Other YouTube features
External sources
Direct or unknown sources
The Devices Report
Last but not least, you’ll want to add the Devices report to your list of regularly pulled reports. More than 50% of YouTube traffic comes from mobile devices. This report gives you information on the difference devices—including computer, mobile, tablet, game consoles and TVs—and operating systems that viewers used to watch your videos.
This data can better inform both your advertising and outreach strategies. It can also influence the type of content you’re sharing. If a majority of your views are coming from mobile devices, those 10-plus minute tutorials, for instance, might need to be shortened for easier viewing.
YouTube Analytics: Engagement Reports
In addition to views, you’ll want to know how people are interacting with your videos. That’s where YouTube’s engagement reports can help. On YouTube, engagement is measured through a variety of factors:
Likes
Dislikes
Comments
Subscriptions
Sharing
You might want to prioritize these based on your business objectives or type of video you’re sharing. For example, a tutorial video might be used a customer support tool where comments are encouraged, while a video published for entertainment purposes will want to rack up likes and shares.
The Subscribers Report
One of the more interesting reports to follow is the Subscribers report. This report shows how you’ve gained and lost subscribers across different content, locations and dates. It’ll help you better understand which videos were better at driving subscriptions and identify locations where your content is performing particularly well.
Noteworthy metrics:
Subscribers Gained: The number of times that users subscribed to a channel.
Subscribers Lost: The number of times that users unsubscribed from a channel.
The Likes & Dislikes Report
This report is fairly self explanatory, but it’s worth highlighting. The Likes and Dislikes report shows the net change of likes and dislikes in your videos. It adds up the number of likes and dislikes minus the number of likes and dislikes removed.
Your approach to engagement on YouTube should be a holistic one, so if you’re not getting a high number of likes, don’t fret. Viewers might be sharing or commenting more than they’re liking. You do want to watch out if your videos are getting a substantial number of dislikes, however. You can’t please everyone, so don’t worry if you get a couple of random dislikes. But if your videos are consistently racking up the thumbs-down, consider reaching out to your audience to get a handle on the problem.
Noteworthy metrics:
Likes: The number of times that users indicated they liked a video by giving it a positive rating.
Dislikes: The number of times that users indicated they disliked a video by giving it a negative rating.
The Videos in Playlists Report
The Videos in Playlists report replaced the Favorites report, which used to tell you how many times viewers marked your video as a favorite and how many removed it from their favorites. The new report shows you how many times your videos were added to or removed from viewers’ playlists. This includes default playlists, like Watch Later or Favorites, as well as any custom playlist.
Knowing which playlists your videos are added to can be very helpful. This could inspire content for future videos or at the very least, give you a better idea of the type of content your viewers are interested in. Additionally, knowing how much time viewers spend in one of your playlists lets you know how successful it. Use that information moving forward with new playlists.
Noteworthy metrics:
Average Time in Playlist: The estimated average amount of time, in minutes, that a user viewed videos in a playlist after the playlist was initiated. This only includes playlist views that occur on the Web.
Playlists Starts: The number of times that viewers initiated playback of a playlist. This only includes playlist views that occur on the Web.
Videos Added to Playlists: The number of times videos were added to any YouTube playlists, including the video owner’s playlists or other channels’ playlists.
Videos Removed From Playlists: The number of times videos were removed from any YouTube playlists.
Views Per Playlist Start: The average number of video views that occurred each time a playlist was initiated. This only includes playlist views that occur on the Web.
The Comments Report
The Comments report summarizes how many people comment on your video.
Comments are a great way to interact with viewers. We know you’re focused on creating excellent video content, but make sure you devote some time to respond to people who leave comments. Response time is critical, especially on customer support and tutorial videos.
The Sharing Report
The Sharing report shows how many times your content has been shared through the Share button on YouTube, as well as other sites like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.
Sharing is key, especially if you’re publishing new product videos or exciting announcements. According to Nielson, 84% of consumers say they trust recommendations from family, colleagues and friends about products.
The Annotations Report
The Annotations report provides you with information on the performance of your video annotations, including clickthrough rates and close rates.
Annotations encourage viewers to take action while watching one of your videos. When used correctly, they can improve engagement and viewership which is why you need to make sure you’re implementing them correctly. The data available in this report should influence how you incorporate annotations into future videos.
Noteworthy metrics:
Annotation Clicks: The number of clicked annotations.
Annotation Clickable Impressions: The number of annotations that appeared and could be clicked.
Annotation Clickthrough Rate: The ratio of annotations that viewers clicked to the total number of clickable annotation impressions.
Annotation Closable Impressions: The number of annotations that appeared and could be closed.
Annotation Close Rate: The ratio of annotations that viewers closed to the total number of annotation impressions.
Annotation Closes: The number of closed annotations.
Annotation Impressions: The total number of annotation impressions.
The Cards Report
Another way to make your YouTube videos more interactive is through the use of cards. Depending on the card type, you’ll be able to add in an image, title and call-to-action.
The Cards report shows you how viewers are interacting with cards on your videos across desktop, mobile and tablets.
Noteworthy metrics:
Card Clicks: The number of times that cards were clicked.
Card Click Rate: The clickthrough rate for cards, which is calculated as the ratio of card clicks to card impressions.
Card Impressions: The number of times cards were displayed. When the card panel is opened, a card impression is logged for each of the video’s cards.
Card Teaser Click Rate: The clickthrough rate for card teasers, which is calculated as the ratio of clicks on card teasers to the total number of card teaser impressions.
Card Teaser Clicks: The number of clicks on card teasers. Card icon clicks are attributed to the last teaser displayed to the user.
Card Teaser Impressions: The number of times that card teasers were displayed. A video view can generate multiple teaser impressions.
Get Hands On
The best way to become more comfortable using YouTube Analytics is to get hands on with it. Log in and start clicking around. Talk with your team about which analytics reports will be the most useful in achieving your goals, and discuss who will be in charge for monitoring them.
If your analytics leave something to be desired, review the metrics with your team and identify problem areas you can work on. This data will guide you in deciding which content to focus on so pay close attention to what’s working and what isn’t.
