A Quick and Easy Way to Track Your Impact from YouTube

Your presence on the Internet is a collection of bases and outposts: your business blog or business website is your home base, your Facebook page is an outpost, your YouTube channel is an outpost, your Twitter account is an outpost. All your actions in all your outposts are meant to direct readers to your home base, to the place where you can fully show them what you can do for their businesses.

Tracking how effective your actions are on these outposts require different approaches, depending on the social network. In this article I’ll present a quick and easy way to track your impact on YouTube. As you probably know by now, your own video channel on YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool and a great way to drive traffic to your website.

In this article I’ll concentrate on how you can measure the impact of your videos over your website. The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that you need a strategic approach. The requirement for tracking your results is to have some kind of analytic software installed on your website. I personally use Google Analytics.

The simplest thing you can do is to look at your referral traffic and check for YouTube. In order to get some results you’ll have to edit your video description on YouTube and place a link to your website. People will click it and they’ll show up in your Google Analytics reports.

The big disadvantage of this method is that you can’t measure how effective each video is. I think is very important to know how many of your viewers for a particular video clicked the link in the description and not the overall performance of the video channel.

The solution is a small strategic decision. Instead of creating content that you’ll place as standalone videos on YouTube you’ll create video content that will supplement your articles. Each video will be designed for a specific article. And when you’ll edit the description of the video, the first thing to do will be to place a link to that specific article.

You’ll not have all your videos pointing to your home page but each video points to a specific page, where you’ll probably also embed the video. By making this small adjustment you’ll be able to track the impact of each video. You’ll know what videos work and what not and you may also find out that high number of views does not necessary means lots of clicks.

With this setup you’ll be able to go to your Google Analytics account, go to Content > Content by Title, locate a page that has a YouTube video on it, select it and as a second view option you can check for Source. Now you’ll be able to see how people reached that page. Search for YouTube and see how many visits you receive, what was the bounce rate or how much time they stayed on that page.

You can now compare the number of views with the number of visits and you can make decisions on what types of videos to create in the future so that you’ll increase the click rate.

What do you think of all this? How do you track your impact on YouTube? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.