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Social Media

These YouTube Tools Will Boost Your Video Rankings

Video content is pulling more and more weight in the field of digital marketing, as it becomes easier than ever to post, host, and consume.

Between the astronomical rise of TikTok and the success of YouTube Shorts, not to mention other popular forms of short-form video content, it’s become clearer over time that at least a portion of your budget should be dedicated towards producing good quality video, especially if most of your audience and customer base is online, and social media-savvy.

But simply posting content on platforms like YouTube isn’t enough anymore to profit from your effort. You want content that ranks well and is relevant to people’s searches, bringing you traffic from potential customers, and generating leads.

YouTube Optimization 101

Yes, YouTube videos and community posts require as much optimization as anything else under the Alphabet umbrella. Much of your incoming traffic on YouTube will come from people browsing their Home tab, clicking on related videos with interesting or relevant titles and thumbnails, or through YouTube searches.

Optimizing for these avenues requires you to understand how YouTube ranks videos, what goes into improving your rankings, and how you can translate the data that YouTube provides you itself into actionable advice for future content.

First, it’s important to note that the overall tenets of relevance and authority are still important. YouTube will value content from channels with an established audience, a title that is close to or matches the search term(s), tags that match both the content in the video and the user’s search or search history and view history, and metrics like views and bounce rates.

However, timeliness matters too. YouTube is generally more likely to recommend newer content over older content, even if that older content has a better view count. If you log out of your account and go look up how to install a dishwasher, for example, the first three results will be from within the last 24 months, with less than a million views. Scrolling down reveals older tutorials of over a million, to nearly two million views, dated between seven and nine years ago.

Users can further filter their searches based on duration, certain video features (resolution, VR, location-based videos, subtitles, livestreams), type (video, playlist, channel, film), upload date, view count, and rating. But using the default settings brings you what YouTube considers the most relevant content.

So how do you improve the relevance and ranking potential of your content? Let’s go over a few ideas.

Keep An Eye on Your Metrics

The first and most important tool to use is your own YouTube analytics. Hop onto your own channel studio and head on down to the Analytics tab to reveal a whole slew of information.

You can get an overview of your channel, which provides you with your subscriber count and recent views, as well as overall watch time over time.

YouTube Analytics Reach

Your reach explains how many impressions you content gets (i.e. how often YouTube shows it to users), and what your click through rate is (the rate at which your content is actually clicked on after being shown to a user).

These stats are critical. They are a good metric of how eye-catching your thumbnails and titles are and can be a metric of how relevant your content is to the searches that it is being ranked for. For example, by tightening up your titles, tags, and keywords, you can push YouTube to focus on providing your content to users who are much more likely to be interested in it, and greatly improve your impressions click-through rate.

YouTube Analytics Engagement

Your engagement takes your total watch time (in hours over the last few days), as well as your average view duration. The latter helps you identify if the content you’re producing is being viewed.

Most people don’t finish the videos they start watching on YouTube, and it’s generally rare to have content where people get all the way to the end. But if the majority of people coming to your content are clicking away after a few seconds, that may be a red flag for how you’re targeting viewers. Furthermore, this metric might help you understand what the ideal watch time (and video time) is for your audience.

YouTube Analytics Audience

Finally, the audience tab helps you distinguish returning from unique viewers, and track your channel’s growth and capacity to hold onto an audience. If you see your returning viewers plummet drastically, it’s clear that the content you’ve been producing lately is veering away from what people are interested in.

On the other hand, if that nets you more unique viewers who then turn into a greater number of returning viewers, then it might have been a good idea to shift towards a different niche or angle. Other useful statistics provided by the audience tab include peak user viewing hours (the time period during which most of your viewers are online), your top geographies, viewer age and gender, and other videos and channels they tend to watch.

These are very important data points. The first few hours of a video’s life matter immensely for YouTube, and the better your video does right out the gate, the longer YouTube will recommend it and pass it around.

Encourage Viewers to Subscribe, Like, and Turn on Notifications

While it’s a tad bit annoying, there’s plenty of data to suggest that even just mentioning the like and subscribe buttons helps remind viewers to like a video they actually do like and subscribe to a channel they may have been binging without subscribing.

People do forget to click those buttons and reminding your audience to do so is a small but effective optimization hack to retain an audience, and help YouTube understand that your content is interesting to people. Of course, turning it into a tasteful call-to-action rather than an obnoxious ad helps a lot.

Follow the Trend

Now that you know the basics about navigating YouTube Analytics, let’s take a look at a number of other tools that can help you optimize your video content, starting with keyword and trend research:

YouTube autocomplete – Stumped on what to cover next? Use YouTube’s own autocomplete to figure out the current trend for your niche or channel focus.

Keywords Everywhere – This is a useful browser extension that serves as a keyword research tool by letting you find effective long-tail phrases for your niche.

Doing Adjacent Keyword Research

In addition to researching seed keywords or search terms, you can figure out adjacent keywords through these useful tools:

Keyword Planner – Google Keyword Planner is another effective way to figure out related topics and search terms.

AnswerThePublic – input a certain keyword or phrase to discover a whole network of related terms and adjacent search phrases, or search questions.

Pick the Right Tags

YouTube tags help YouTube’s search engine better sort content and figure out what users might be interested in, outside of other metrics of quality, authority, and relevance. While not as weighty as your overall audience retention and other trends, tags can still help out. These tools help you identify and generate tags for your content:

vidIQ – Provides a slew of growth tools for channels, including tag generation.

RapidTags – A powerful tag generator, among other useful functions.

YouTube Tags – This browser extension helps you view the tags on any video, useful for competition research.

Most of the effort behind making successful video content like that goes into the production, the script, the direction of the video. But a good portion also relies on proper optimization.

If you’re having trouble getting your YouTube content off the floor, some of these tools might help you a lot. Working with the right professionals, of course, will bring you the best results. Give us a call to find out how we can help you grow your YouTube channel, and turn it into a major boon for your business.

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Social Media

Updates To YouTube Analytics

Growing a successful channel on the world’s largest video platform is not an easy feat, and YouTube’s relatively limited analytics features haven’t made it any easier. Some channels seem to explode in popularity overnight, while others languish for years – even with consistent uploads.

There are many unknown variables regarding how YouTube recommends and promotes content, and new features – from community posts and membership details to the recent rollout of YouTube Shorts – often aren’t sufficiently explained to new content creators.

Thankfully, five new YouTube analytics updates aim to address some of these issues and help give creators a better idea of what direction to take their content in. These five new updates include tools to gauge engagement on some of YouTube’s more recent additions to the platform (including membership and community posts), as well as make it easier for content creators to access and review analytics data on the go.

More Membership Insights and Analytics

YouTube first introduced channel membership in mid-2018, but there haven’t been many ways to track channel membership statistics or get in-depth information on how a channel could best grow its membership numbers.

Now, YouTube content creators will be able to review multiple different metrics to get a better idea of how their viewer membership numbers grow with time.

Aside from total members, YouTube analytics will also track which videos attract the most members, how an upload impacts a channel’s membership numbers, as well as analytics data to help determine whether it’s better to remind viewers about the perks of membership, or whether doing so will detract from membership growth.

Some content creators are anxious about reminding their audience to become members because they don’t want to annoy or upset them. Now they can have actionable data to see whether doing so in a video makes a difference one way or the other.

Content creators will also be able to see their daily changes and check out their number of total members, active members, and canceling members. Note that YouTube channel members are paying supporters, who unlock several channel-related perks (emojis, early videos, badges, and other members-only perks) at the cost of a small monthly subscription fee. A channel member is not the same thing as a channel subscriber, who subscribes to and enjoys the channel’s content for free.

More Data for Mobile Analytics Users

There isn’t much of a point in accessing and reviewing your analytics data on mobile devices when you’re only getting half of the picture. Recognizing this, YouTube added two features to the mobile YouTube analytics interface that were previously only accessible on desktop versions. These are the ability to review what other channels your audience watches, and what other videos your audience watches.

Both of these metrics serve to help content creators get a better handle on what sort of content interests their viewers and better identify how they can target and grow their viewer base – or, potentially, expand into a wholly different direction.

Content creators can currently view up to 15 different channels and videos commonly viewed by their audience, on mobile. Each of these can be tapped, automatically forwarding you to the YouTube app on your phone, so you can watch what your audience watches right away.

More Explanation for Video Performance Metrics

YouTube isn’t adding new metrics for video performance but is expanding its explanation on existing video performance metrics, so content creators have a better idea of where this data is coming from, what it represents, and how it should be interpreted.

For example – YouTube will now explain that you’ve been getting more views than before through YouTube’s recommendations system and that more (or fewer) of your regular viewers have been watching this video than your other videos, allowing you to test new thumbnails.

This can help make YouTube Studios’ analytics a little more intuitive to new users, and help experienced content creators get a refresher on their video performance metrics, and how they should use them to improve on their content.

More Transparency in Revenue and Regional Monetization Rates

YouTube will be providing more information on a channel’s revenue, as well as how viewership changes might affect that revenue, particularly with respect towards viewer regions.

CPM rates (cost per mille, or thousand viewers) differ from region to region, based on where advertisers put their money. This means some regions are more financially enticing to target than others.

The new analytic changes into a channel’s monetization and revenue are meant to help content creators learn more about where their viewers are coming from, and how their revenue is calculated. This is helpful when targeting specific regions.

More Engagement Metrics for Community Content

Community posts are also a relatively new addition to YouTube, and are available to all content creators with over 1,000 total subscribers, one week after passing the 1,000 subscriber benchmark. Community posts can be shared in the form of polls, captioned images, and texts, and are usually used to share upcoming channel events, announce upcoming content, tease new content, get audience feedback (in the form of polls), and generally engage with the audience.

But the problem is that community posts didn’t previously feature much in the way of actionable data. YouTube has changed that with more engagement metrics, letting content creators review how their post has been doing over the last four weeks in terms of views, votes (on polls), and likes.

YouTube is aiming to make it easier than ever to get started on the platform – and a lot of these changes are also aimed at helping new content creators grow at a faster pace, by identifying what works and what doesn’t from day one. YouTube also seems to be paying more attention to mobile content creators, with the introduction and promotion of YouTube Shorts, and the expansion of YouTube’s analytic features on mobile.

Video content is becoming more important year after year, and it can be an indispensable tool for gaining traffic and leads, especially in a competitive market. Wondering if these changes are relevant to your channel? Not sure where to start growing your video content? Get in touch with us to learn more.

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Social Media

YouTube Introduces Shorts: A Platform to Rival TikTok

“And the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.” The first video ever uploaded to YouTube in April 2005 was a simple 18-second clip of entrepreneur Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, filmed in front of an elephant enclosure.

Since then, short, viral clips have often defined YouTube’s success as the premiere video content platform on the Internet. But since the platform’s inception, other websites and apps have had their chunk of the video traffic pie, prioritizing short-form content over the larger and longer videos often found on YouTube – rival apps and platforms like Snapchat, Vine, and the latest competitor TikTok, have forced YouTube to redefine and reiterate.

In its attempt to outbid TikTok on short-form video content, YouTube has developed and soft-launched YouTube Shorts.

What is YouTube Shorts?

YouTube Shorts is a new function or app (titled a “video experience”) integrated into the YouTube platform. YouTube Shorts is dedicated to short-form content, designed to be created and edited entirely on mobile devices.

The company is claiming to be working on lowering the barrier of entry on creative video content, while attempting to capitalize on the difficult year its Chinese competitor has had.

Prior to its release in the US this March, YouTube Shorts exclusively launched in India, and so far, it lets creators upload short clips with musical overlays, as well as giving users tools to string clips together and create hands-free videos through a countdown timer.

Earlier last month, YouTube further expanded the Shorts toolkit by giving creators the option to sample and remix audio from other Shorts, overlay text, and more.

YouTube Shorts and YouTube Stories

The main difference between YouTube Shorts and YouTube Stories is that content uploaded to the short shelf will be permanent unless you decide to remove it. YouTube Stories, modelled after the success of Snapchat, deletes each Story after one week.

YouTube Stories may be a way to keep your audience engaged and interact with them – but YouTube Shorts may be recommended to viewers years later, much like any other video on the platform, and may gain traction long after its upload date.

The Latest, But Not the First

YouTube’s latest addition to the platform may be the first time it has stood up to TikTok specifically, but it isn’t the first time a company has tried to capitalize on TikTok’s troubles in India and the US.

Instagram launched its Reels function to very little fanfare and much criticism, and Snapchat’s Spotlight feature has gone so far as to provide would-be users with a financial incentive for uploading to the platform: $1 million a day, given to the users with the most entertaining uploads. Meanwhile, Clash has acquired Byte, and Reddit bought Dubsmash – clearly, the short-form video content market is growing.

Will YouTube’s hat in the ring pull ahead of other bite-sized social media contenders? It’s still too early to tell.

YouTube’s main advantage in the race for the top spot may be its existing user base and content creator ecosystem. The platform has over two billion monthly active users, and preliminary statistics out of India show that YouTube Shorts content accumulated 3.5 billion daily views.

If you haven’t considered investing some time and resources into video content, then Shorts may not just be an excellent potential entry point for your brand, but also marks the first time the platform has specifically empowered users without a dedicated video content creation setup, providing multiple recording and editing tools directly within the app itself.

Can You Create YouTube Shorts?

Before its global release, YouTube Shorts were exclusive to a few select creators – that’s changed recently, and anyone can start making Shorts today. Using YouTube’s Shorts camera, your content will be limited to 15 seconds.

But any vertically filmed video with up to 60 seconds can get picked up by YouTube as a Short. For these longer Shorts, the minimum criteria may be subject to change, but right now, the only requirements are that:

  • The video must be under a minute in total length.
  • The video must be vertically oriented.
  • The video must be uploaded as normal.

YouTube then automatically picks out videos that fit its YouTube Shorts format and feature them on the short shelf. Using the hashtag #shorts may make it easier for the platform to pick your video up.

Where Can You Watch YouTube Shorts?

YouTube Shorts can currently be found on the YouTube mobile app, on a section of the homepage called the short shelf. Each video is filmed in a vertical format, and YouTube is currently working on how and why each Short is displayed for any given user.

Rather than Stories, which are shown to subscribers and generally keep a viewer on the creator’s page as they flick through a few days’ worth of short content, Shorts are recommended based on viewing history much like normal video content, with users being given the option to subscribe to each new creator they come across during their bite-sized binge.

For videos longer than 35 seconds, YouTube is still giving Shorts content creators the option of adding an end screen element.

YouTube Shorts for Advertisers

Businesses looking to leverage YouTube Shorts might like to know that these videos aren’t currently heavily monetized.

You can make money off of them but given their length and the experimental nature of the new product, the majority of the profit for a channel producing YouTube Shorts would come either from the fact that new viewers might check out the other, more profitable content on the channel, or they may become potential leads as a result of the content.

That doesn’t mean Shorts you produce today may not end up being vastly more profitable in the future, once YouTube figures out how it’s going to monetize its new video format. Until then, perhaps the greatest value in the new format is its potential for brand exposure, as YouTube is and will continue to heavily push Shorts in the coming weeks.

YouTube Shorts are currently being found by viewers either through the short shelf, a channel’s page, in the user’s subscription feed, and through YouTube search.

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Social Media

YouTube Working to Combat Predatory Behavior

YouTube has certainly had its fair share of press in the past couple of weeks. First, there was hysteria about the “Momo Challenge.” This turned out to be a hoax.

Then, there was the announcement that the platform would be taking action to combat predatory behavior against children in comment threads. This all started with a content creator who identified suspicious comments from questionable users on videos made for or by children. Many of the comments were suggestive or contained links to extremely illegal websites. Worse yet, the same people were abusing the site’s “related videos” algorithm to make it easier to find the links.

The good news is that YouTube immediately did the responsible thing and took action. Ultimately, all of this hardship is spurring on new changes to make the platform safer and more reliable for people (especially minors). This has a direct effect in video marketing and advertising.

The Official Announcement

Changes actually took place over two phases. The first phase was announced on February 22, 2019, on YouTube’s support channel. YouTube made it clear that the video publishers themselves haven’t done anything wrong; it’s the people abusing the system in the comments who are the issue. They found a litany of inappropriate comments directed at children and teens featured in many popular videos.

The platform started by removing thousands of comments. They also terminated offending commenter accounts and channels. To further their efforts, YouTube reported content deemed illegal to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

The second update appeared on YouTube’s blog on February 28, 2019. Platform officials announced the decision to completely disable the ability to leave comments on content that features young minors. While needed, this change does significantly impact thousands of businesses who market to children and families.

Will Any Videos with Minors Have Comments?

The act to disable comments was not initially applied to all minors. YouTube’s update is rather vague about the exact ages, but they are initially targeting the change towards videos featuring younger minors as they seem to be more at-risk when it comes to predatory behavior. They will start to look at channels and videos featuring older minors to determine which are more likely to attract predators  over the next several months.

YouTube did state that some channels will be allowed to keep their comment features turned on. These creators will be subject to close scrutiny and have to take a very active role when it comes to moderating comments on their videos. They are also continuing to work towards developing stronger comment moderation tools and classifiers.

Why This Is Important to Marketers

YouTube recognizes the fact that creators use comments to maintain regular levels of engagement with their followers. Some creators fear they will not be able to maintain their viewership if they can’t engage. On the other hand, the fact that comments are disabled on a channel does not mean the creators can no longer monetize their videos. People who qualify for monetization won’t see any changes in that regard.

YouTube is definitely feeling a monetary pinch on a corporate level, though. A lot of the most recent controversy began when YouTuber, MattsWhatItIs, released a 20-minute video, “Youtube is Facilitating the Sexual Exploitation of Children, and it’s Being Monetized.” Matt describes a “wormhole” that allowed pedophiles to use the algorithms to leave links to child pornography in the comment sections of different videos while also connecting privately and sharing secret links.

He also presented what he believed to be evidence that the soft-core content being shared on YouTube is also being monetized. As a result, major advertisers like Epic Games and Walt Disney, among others, paused their ad spends on the platform.

The Issue for Marketers

The issue here, from a marketing perspective, is two-fold. There are marketers with YouTube channels of their own, looking to promote content, but there are also marketers paying Google to have their ads featured in various locations throughout the site itself. The problem is that neither the creators nor the advertisers have any control over where the ads end up. It’s all up to Google and YouTube’s algorithms.

While an ad might meet Google’s guidelines, it might be awkward for a piece about an adult product to play before a video intended for a less mature audience, even if the channel is following all of YouTube’s terms of service. There is also a fear that an advertisement could inadvertently end up showing in the middle of a video that is predatory or that contains some other form of illicit content. This is harder to detect if the videos themselves are unlisted or secret.

This leaves brands concerned about the safety of their own reputations. When people see an ad embedded in a questionable video, they almost immediately assume the brand is associated with the content. As a result, they are demanding ad platforms make a more concentrated effort to streamline the visibility of their ad content.

What You Can Do

The majority of business owners and brands using YouTube to advertise or monetize won’t have a lot of trouble working within the terms of service. Those who feature products geared towards children may need to get a little more creative about their video marketing efforts in the coming months, focusing a lot less on featuring young children and more on the products themselves.

At this point, it’s difficult to tell exactly how YouTube will treat the channels of local or larger brands as opposed to those that feature children in craft, toy review, and other entrepreneurial channels. It initially seems as though these may be among the channels that are able to keep comments enabled with higher levels of monitoring.

If you are an advertiser, you’ll want to contact your account representative to find out what Google is doing to make sure your ads are showing on videos that are deemed appropriate and safe for your brand. We’re not saying you need to run out and suspend the advertising campaigns that are working for you (in fact, that’s the wrong move altogether in most cases) but we do highly recommend you monitor the placement of your hard-earned ad dollars.

There is absolutely no doubt that the safety of children should be the number one priority of everyone operating in the online sphere. App developers, social media platforms, and everyone with a hand in the creation of technology has a responsibility to make sure what is put out for consumption is not only safe for children to see, but also combats predatory behavior.

At Sachs Marketing Group, we can help you navigate this difficult sphere and market your videos effectively. We also specialize in reputation management if you’ve found yourself in a situation where you’re being unfairly associated with a platform’s mistakes. Reach out to us today!

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