Workshop: YouTube metrics

By Owain Button

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, only beaten by Google, and is the third most used site in the UK, behind Google and Facebook. If you want to have your organisation's messages seen and interacted with (33% of videos result in a comment) then YouTube is a good bet.

YouTube allows account holders to look at and analyse key metrics, which will show the relative success of their videos. But which metrics should you pay most attention to?

• Views – We'll start with the most obvious statistic. It is always pleasing to see a large number of views, but alone this statistic is not enough as it doesn't tell you how much of your video viewers have watched.

• Audience Retention – This brings us on to audience retention which measures how long a video has kept people watching for. This is broken down into average view duration and average percentage viewed. A key measure of a good video is the number of people still watching after 30 seconds. Longer videos are likely to have lower average percentage viewed rates.

• Engagement – There are a number of useful engagement metrics within YouTube analytics. These include how many people have "liked" or "disliked" your video, how many times it has been commented on and how many times it has been shared. Sharing in particular is a good measure of the quality of and interest in your content.

• Channel Subscribers - If you're looking at the long term, this is perhaps the most important metric of all. If you can build up a subscriber base (and we would certainly encourage driving people towards the 'subscribe' button) then the work you need to put in to distribute and promote videos becomes less with each video you publish, as you have a basis of loyal followers who will do it for you. You can monitor the number of people who subscribe, and unsubscribe, on a per video basis.

It goes without saying that YouTube is a great platform to place videos, and its suite of analytics is comprehensive for a free service. Paid-for video hosting platforms such as Wistia and Brightcove provide greater levels of detail, but as a basic measure of levels of interest in your content the YouTube tools do a good job.

For more information on video for public affairs campaigns by VoiceOver call 020 7517 2225 or visit www.politics.co.uk/voiceover