How to know if your Videos just plain *SUCK* | Ep. 33

Do you know how to use YouTube analytics to enhance your video content? In this episode, I explore the key metrics that can help you determine if your videos are truly engaging.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Meredith: I don't want this to come off sounding rude or insulting, but unless you're totally new to this podcast, you probably already know that growing your audience on YouTube comes down to views and watch time. Like make yourself easy to find, make yourself easy to watch. And then make it easy for those viewers to come back to you.

And the algorithm will reward you by growing your audience

and bringing new people to your channel. So if your videos aren't easy to watch, 

You would want to know that, right? Not so that you can feel bad about yourself or, uh, you know, just sit here and think, well, I suck at making videos, so I guess I should give up, but so that you can make a few tweaks and improve as you go.

So let's dive into that here in episode 33 of Video Brand Infusion. And if you're watching the video version of this right now, you can see a box behind me here. I got one of the new MacBook Pros and I'm [00:01:00] like dying to open it and play with it, but I need to record this episode first. So. Let's get right to it.

My name is Meredith. I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business, so that you can build your thriving video brand. And when I meet new video brand Academy members or clients for the very first time, it's not uncommon for me to hear something like, you know, I know I need a new camera.

I know I need a new, like, video editing software. can you help me figure out what to buy to make my videos look better? Or they ask, can you watch my videos and tell me what to improve?

And wouldn't it be great if you could just Buy a new camera or a fancy new lens and poof, magically your videos are better and they perform better and your audience grows faster. And

it was just as easy as a new camera, a new lens, or a new piece of software. Now I do have a whole crush it on [00:02:00] camera series here on YouTube where I talk about creating this tubical space for you to set up so that you do look good on camera and sound good on camera, and feel good talking to a camera and create, you know, professional looking, polished YouTube videos that establish you as the go-to expert in your niche.

but what if you feel like you're already doing everything right? And you still suspect that maybe your videos just kind of suck

I'm a big fan of using your own data, your own metrics to make decisions, including making decisions about whether you need to upgrade your camera or need to change how you edit your videos or make quote unquote better videos or not.

Because the good news is YouTube tells you what's Wrong. I'll put that in quotes too. What's wrong with your videos if anything seriously Your analytics tell you what [00:03:00] to fix or change or tweak in your videos

YouTube's not gonna call you up and complain about your video quality. You might get negative comments, uh, about your video quality or even just honest comments from people letting you know that something's not right. Like your audio is too low or doesn't sound good or you talk too fast or usually for me, it's you talk too much.

Which, first of all, buddy, this is YouTube. This is where people go to talk and listen to people talking. But second of all, I always love to respond. There's no such thing as talking too much, only understanding too little. It's just a little reframe But either way, like a lot of those are just people's comments or opinions. Even your thoughts about your video quality, whether your videos suck or not, is really your opinion, unless you're looking at Your actual analytics. So how can you use your YouTube analytics to determine whether or not your YouTube videos suck?

Okay. [00:04:00] That's the question. That's the, um, topic of the day.

last week, I was putting together some new training for, uh, inside video brand Academy, a new growth strategy that I put together for them. And I came across some of my older videos from, um, Like nine years ago, 10 years ago. And every once in a while, like, I mean, they're all on my channel, but every once in a while I will, you know, hit play on an older video and just roll my eyes and think, Oh my gosh, this is so cringy.

But one of the ones that I clicked on last week, I was like, I was like yelling at the camera this was like nine years ago. So maybe my voice has changed over the time, but I was like yelling at the camera. My voice was like higher and like more strained.

that wasn't the way that I talked to people in person. It wasn't the way that I would have talked to somebody on a zoom call at the time. But [00:05:00] yet that's like how it came out in a YouTube video. 

It was way too cringy and awful. I point that out because I think there are a lot of, um, I think there are a lot of things that you can point out in your videos that you don't like. You don't like the way that you look. You wish your skin was smoother. You wish you talked faster. You wish you talked slower.

you can put out really pretty bad looking videos. And still grow your channel, right? I did. mean, I'm not trying to brag, but I think the content I was putting out was informative and useful and, you know, hopefully there was like enough of my real authentic personality in there for people to say, Oh, I kind of like her.

Yeah. I could watch more of her content. So there are a lot of metrics when you open up your YouTube studio and you can, if you're not like driving while you listen or watch this, you open up your YouTube studio on your desktop. There are so many metrics that they throw at you. [00:06:00] Click through rate is a big one. A lot of people like to focus on click through rate because then we're talking about like thumbnails and titles and I love analyzing click through rates.

But clifiorates don't tell you anything about whether or not your video sucks. They don't tell you whether your content sucks or whether it's good. they only tell you whether the, the chance of that piece of content is good or bad. Whether the, you know, It's interesting. It got people's attention. It got in front of the right people.

What happens after somebody clicks play? That's what you really want to know. That's the information in your analytics that you really want to analyze. And I think it's not as black and white as fixing a thumbnail or tweaking a title. Those things you can do after the fact, after you publish your video, you could drastically improve your click through rate, your overall views, and you know how your video performs over time by tweaking your thumbnail and [00:07:00] title, but you can't do that after you've already recorded and uploaded it for the stuff that's happening in your video.

Like how long you're talking about a topic or what is being shown on the screen.

So number one, I know I've talked about this before on the podcast. YouTube gives you your retention information for all of your videos. Retention meaning how long on average did viewers who clicked play, watch the video for. You have a 30 second retention metric. Anytime that YouTube gives you a metric, And each time they just hand you numbers on a silver platter and say, here, look at this, 30 second retention.

Here you go. It's a 71%. Good job. It's telling you, we value this. Our algorithm values this. The platform values this metric. If they're telling you the metric. you should be paying attention to it. So a 30 second retention metric is something you want to [00:08:00] pay attention to because when someone hit play, did they keep watching or did they hit the back button?

In the case of me watching my own video from last week that I recorded like nine years ago, I hit the back button so fast. I was like, Nope, I'm not watching this. I can't, I can't watch it.

Obviously That's not what you want to have happen on your videos, and your analytics tell you that. They tell you, when someone hit play, did they say, yes, I want to keep watching, or did they say, nope, I'm out, I can't watch this. there's always a drop off, by the way.

I don't know. About anybody else, but on, on my analytics and all the analytics I've seen, there's always a big, deep drop off at the very beginning of a video. The question is how deep is that drop off

you can improve things like the words you say, the hook, your opening hook of your video.

Does it match your title [00:09:00] thumbnail? You know, I'm not saying like, is it matchy matchy? Like, are you saying the exact same words, but does it match the topic? Um, imagine you go to the grocery store, you buy a gallon of milk, you get home, you open it up, you pour it in a glass and it's chocolate milk. Well, the package didn't match what was inside.

That's not what you wanted. it's like, it's not the thing that you bought. You, the packaging said one thing, what was inside was something completely different. You're not a happy customer at that point.

And that's kind of what that 30 second retention tells you is does the packaging match the product once, once they got inside,

Beyond that 30 second retention, you have the retention of the whole video, right? How many people who hit play actually watched the whole thing? So this is where you want to look at something like your average view duration and average percentage viewed.

The difference [00:10:00] between those two numbers is Average view duration is the average, like, length of time. that people have watched this video on average, when someone hits play, this is the amount of minutes that somebody watches the video.

So this obviously is dependent on how long the video is. Average percentage viewed is just the percentage of that number. If your video is, 10 minutes long, and on average people watch for 5 minutes, then your average percentage viewed is 50%.

Now, remember, YouTube wants watch time, they want views and watch time, they want people to be on the platform forever, for as long as possible. And so, the longer your average view durations are, generally, the better off you are, the better off you're going to be. 

and remember your channel doesn't exist within a vacuum. Your channel is not the only channel on YouTube [00:11:00] for your niche. That's covering the topics that you're covering, right? So. It's impossible to say like, Oh, shoot for five minutes, uh, average view duration. Because if, if you say you showed up on YouTube with a totally new topic and everyone is suddenly really interested in it, You could have a two minute average view duration if you're the only videos out there on the topic like that's pretty good but someone comes along and suddenly they're able to retain viewers for four minutes, five minutes, six minutes, ten minutes, even longer, then it benefits YouTube to get those videos out in front of more people rather than your videos, right?

So there's so many different kinds of factors that go into this and things to look at. This is one of the reasons why I tell my video brand Academy members make longer videos. You want more watch time, make longer videos. 

I started doing this, you know, earlier this [00:12:00] year and last year, I started experimenting with it more. It's one of the reasons why I started a video podcast. Uh, one of the many reasons was. I want to be able to create longer videos, but I don't want to have to edit longer videos. So this is just me talking to the camera.

I'm going to edit it. I've already made Like, I don't know, a hundred mistakes or so, uh, so far or restarted my sentences. I took a phone call, you know, I'm going to have to edit it, but I don't have to switch back and forth between my screen or two different camera angles or, you know, there's not a whole lot of stuff going on that has to be edited.

It's just the words in my face saying those words themselves. And so I wanted to be able to create longer. Video content. And so that I would have longer average view durations, longer watch time, a mass, more watch time on the platform, because that's what benefits YouTube. And we're always trying [00:13:00] to create content.

That's a win for YouTube, a win for us and a win for the viewer. Longer videos is. a really simple way to do that.

I heard once 50 percent average percentage viewed was considered good, something to shoot for. I find it really hard to get to 50%.

I would rather Create a longer video and have somebody stay 25 percent of the time than a shorter video and have someone stay 50 percent of the time because it's not so much about the percentage, how long really, like how many minutes on average are people staying? So the way you want to think about this, if you're asking this question of do my YouTube videos suck?

If you have a 10 minute long video and people are only watching. To the one minute mark on average, then there's something about the video. That's just not keeping their interest. It's not keeping them engaged. It's not keeping them retained. [00:14:00] Is it that the content didn't match the packaging once they watched past 30 seconds?

Is it because you just were boring? Is it because you didn't get to the point quick enough? You didn't get to the actual topic of the video quick enough?

It's probably not because of the way that your video looks visually like the video quality of your video, which I talked about before. In a recent episode here on whether or not your video quality actually matters, your audio quality matters. Your audio quality matters a lot. That's something you can ask yourself.

Maybe your video is easy to watch, but it's not easy to listen to.

so the sort of crude answer here 

if you are looking at your average percentage viewed your average view duration, and you're like, Oh my gosh, people are only watching like 10 percent of my videos. I mean, especially after you put all that time and energy into it, it can be disheartening. But what [00:15:00] you need to know is now, you know, there's room for improvement 

And there's tons of tips and Shortcuts and things like that inside of Video Brand Academy for increasing your retention.

There's a lot of different kind of like moving parts and variables to that. But the point is, now you know the answer to the question, do my videos suck or not? 

And that's just part of the experimentation nature of content creation and YouTube and owning a business and starting a business and talking to a camera. There's always room to experiment and improve. It does, I think, take deliberate action, like deliberately trying to improve. And I was just having this conversation inside of one of our video brand academy meetups with somebody we're talking about teleprompters and I love my teleprompter.

I'm not using it right now. I just look glanced over at it. There's nothing on it and I have a different camera [00:16:00] connected to it. I haven't used my teleprompter in quite a while. Not because it's not useful. It is, it's actually very useful for. videos where I want to be very scripted or I need to be very scripted.

But for my regular YouTube videos, for my video podcasts, I am trying to deliberately be more, uh, off the cuff, but like in an authentic way, in a personality way, but also in a clarity way. Like I want to sort of trust my brain and my mouth to spit the words out of which again, I'm obviously failing at right at this very moment.

But I want to practice trusting my brain and my mouth to like spit the words out in a smart way,And so, in that case, the teleprompter becomes a little bit of a crutch.

so that's just an example of experimenting and being deliberate about building [00:17:00] skills as you are growing your channel and learning and tweaking as you go. You don't have to have this stuff figured out from the very beginning. You tweak and learn and evolve as you go. Just like with anything.

that's not unique to YouTube. It's just on YouTube. Everyone's watching you while you figure it out.

and at the end of the day, if you're getting comments on your content from people thanking you for your video, thanking you for this tutorial, or in some way showing appreciation for the content you create, then of course your videos don't suck.

They're useful to the people you are trying to reach. Now, if you can improve them as you go, you have the ability to reach more people. Not only that, you have the ability to create content that is even in better service to those people,

And that's, that's what we're here [00:18:00] for. That's why your channel exists. That's why your business exists.

and I honestly think the only way to truly suck on YouTube is to not make improvements. It's to assume that Your videos just are the way they are and you're not willing to change or improve or look at anything objectively. That's how you suck on YouTube. keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Never asking for help, never asking for feedback, never looking at your analytics, and never listening to your own Audience who might be telling you in comments but are for sure telling you in the data that youtube is showing you How your videos are doing from from that perspective of like are they good or are they bad?

Now, if you like getting feedback on your content, if you like having these kinds of conversations with other creators and asking questions from people like myself or doing a whole deep dive on your YouTube analytics, that's exactly what we do inside of Video Brand [00:19:00] Academy, which is my monthly membership.

so if you're like a Lone Ranger out here, doing YouTube on your own and wondering, how do I improve my videos? What should I try? What's working on YouTube right now? I invite you to hop on the wait list. I'll let you know when the doors are open to Video Brand Academy next and hope to see you inside.