School marketing has become more visual than ever, and YouTube is partially responsible for this development, because video content can generate more interest from your prospects compared to plain text and images, especially when it is integrated on social media platforms. By using YouTube as one of your marketing tools, your viewers can know more about your school more conveniently and effectively, and this can lead to more enrolments.
However, if you want to maximise the benefits of using YouTube, you must understand the effectiveness of your videos quantitatively via YouTube’s proprietary analytics. There are many metrics you can measure so it’s helpful to learn their functions and importance.
Here are your school’s essential YouTube metrics to measure:
- Views
The number of views is the primary indicator of your video’s effectiveness. You can track the number of views across different timeframes, but it would be best to keep track of it along with the rest of your metrics to see a clearer picture of your video’s effectiveness. You can use YouTube’s interactive views graph to see the spikes and dips over time. - Subscribers
Similar to the number of followers on Twitter and Instagram, the number of subscribers determines the level of retention of viewers on your YouTube profile. The more subscribers you have, the more views you can expect for every subsequent video you upload. You can track the number of subscribers you have gained or lost in specific time periods. - Watch Time
Watch Time refers to the total minutes spent by your viewers watching your video. It is an important metric on YouTube, as it can affect your video’s search rankings in terms of relevance. YouTube has placed so much emphasis on Watch Time over Views that it designed an algorithm and an entire section for it in the Analytics dashboard. A 100 percent Watch Time means that your viewers have seen the entire video all the way through and that you’ve retained their attention and interest throughout the video. - Likes, Dislikes and Comments
Your audience viewer reactions matter, and they can be partially gauged by the number of Likes and Dislikes in your video. More importantly, your viewers’ comments can indicate their level of engagement, and you can get qualitative feedback from them. When you have a high ratio of viewer reactions over the number of views, you have succeeded in generating enough interest and engagement from different viewers. - Shares
As a social media platform, the virality of your video is an important indicator of effectiveness. Sharing is the best form of engagement that you can get from your viewers – it means that they found your content so interesting they have endorsed it to their peers. You can view which videos are shared via social media and which platforms they’re shared on, so you can decide on where to cross-promote your content. - Traffic Sources, Audience Demographics, and Playback Locations
Aside from knowing how your video performs on YouTube, you also have the opportunity to identify and understand your viewers. Audience Demographics allows you to visualise the personas of your viewers by knowing their age, geographical location, and more. Additionally, Traffic Sources and Playback Locations enable you to know how your viewers access your video. You can also know if your video was accessed via the channel page, the YouTube homepage, or embedded links, etc.
Like other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, YouTube metrics can improve your school marketing by pinpointing how your previous posts perform, allowing you to tweak your upcoming posts to fit your prospects’ viewing preferences. You must learn how to interpret your YouTube analytics to make your videos more interesting and effective.
