Whether you have twenty subscribers or a million, a YouTube channel audit is a necessary part of stabilizing your channel and finding ways to increase your audience and reach. The best tools for YouTube channel audits use audience behavior data, SEO insights, and production quality checks to uncover which of your videos are driving growth and why.
Why You Need the Best Tools
A successful YouTube channel rarely happens organically with no thought. Creators and businesses must understand how each of their videos perform, and they must understand why.
An effective channel audit involves a lot of data, and that alone is reason to use the best tools available. Extracting detailed information around viewership, retention, and discoverability is the backbone of a good audit, and it must be thorough.
However, once you have the data, what makes an analysis of a YouTube channel effective is understanding the numbers. Finding patterns across large amounts of content is difficult to find on your own and can be time consuming to try to assess manually.
This makes using the best tools available important to any creator that takes their channel seriously. It’s also one of the reasons why hiring experts like those at grouphugs can be so powerful.
YouTube Studio
When it comes to YouTube channel audit best practices, YouTube Studio is often the ideal starting point. It’s native to the platform and can give you some general data with which you can start to paint a picture of your videos’ performance.
With YouTube Studio, you can see:
- Audience retention graphs
- Impressions
- Click-through rates
- Returning versus new viewer numbers
- Traffic sources
Using this information, you can establish a baseline for performance and start to see trends over time. There are more complex tools available, but this foundation can help you use those tools more effectively.
Search and Discovery
No matter the size of your channel, subscribers are hard won. You want your viewership to be stable and you have to put in the work to keep your subscribers.
However, that isn’t enough. Understanding how new viewers find your content is critical to the long-term success of a channel.
The YouTube Studio Reach tab will show you:
- Which search terms viewers used to find your channel
- Traffic sources within YouTube that led viewers to your channel
- External websites and apps where viewers found your content
- Playlists featuring your videos
- Which videos viewers watched because they were suggested
You can also look at impressions and click-through rates to see how often viewers watched one of your videos after seeing a thumbnail. These numbers will help you understand what is bringing in new viewers so you can use data-driven choices to create long-term growth; they can also reveal why it’s so important to know how to audit YouTube video tags.
SEO and Metadata
There are more than three billion searches on YouTube every day. Paying attention to SEO matters.
While auditing your channel, find a tool that can help you understand where your viewers are coming from and how to replicate content that breaks through. Programs like TubeBuddy, Semrush, and VidIQ can help.
Production Quality
Viewers don’t need much reason to click away from a video, especially if they’re new to a channel. Consistent production is an easy way to make sure you aren’t inadvertently driving away potential subscribers.
An effective channel audit means reviewing your videos and making sure they are all of equally high quality. When editing your videos (or editing them after an audit to repost), use audio and video software that allows you to make sure the waveforms, audio outputs, and captions are consistent across all of your videos.
The Human Component
As in any field, tools are only as strong as the person using them. For all the data and graphs analytic tools can gather for you, nothing is as powerful as the ability to notice patterns and understand the market.
No tool can watch the first thirty seconds of your highest-performing and lowest-performing videos and tell you what makes them different. It also takes experience to understand why one of your videos performed poorly while a similar one released by another channel did much better.
grouphugs can do exactly this. Our experts have focused on creating sustainable channel growth with creators and businesses for years. We use the best tools to bridge the gap between numbers and insight, and can help you understand what you need to take your channel to the next level.
