YouTube is continuing to roll out a relatively new feature for creators which could prove to be the most effective tool for growing your channel. Let’s talk about how to use the YouTube Analytics Research feature practically to get more views for your YouTube channel.
What is YouTube Analytics Research
Located in the “Analytics” section of your dashboard, the YouTube analytics research feature allows you to see what your viewers and other YouTube users are searching for on YouTube:
It’s essentially the closest thing creators have to a keyword tool from YouTube itself.
The concept is simple enough – you input a topic and the tool shows you actual search terms related to that topic which people use.
How to Use YouTube Analytics Research to Get More Views
The two main areas of this feature are “Searches Across YouTube” and “Your Viewers’ Searches”. Their purposes and practical use vary quite a bit, so let’s talk about each one separately.
Your Viewers’ Searches
I’ll briefly start with “Your Viewers’ Searches” which anyone would understandably think would be invaluable data to have.
The idea that you could know the specific search terms that your own viewers are using on YouTube would be a godsend for ideas on content creation.
Unfortunately based on my experience, these results are either too vague or too irrelevant to the focus of my or anyone’s channel to be useful.
Here is a sampling of the results I pulled from a channel of mine which has been around for nearly a decade and has thousands of subscribers:
You would be hard-pressed to determine what my channel is about based on these results. When I tell you it’s in the gaming niche, these results are even more baffling.
What’s more, YT only gave me 30 search terms, and they were all as varied and random as these.
This feature needs a lot more work before it has any practical applications. If they could let you filter out search terms based on category so I could only keep searches YT deems relevant to the gaming niche, it would certainly be more useful.
Unlike with the Searches Across YouTube feature within the YouTube analytics research section which I’m about to cover, there’s no built in search bar.
Add that and you’ll have a feature worth using, otherwise it’s just a random and useless assortment of data.
Searches Across YouTube
This is where the YouTube analytics research tool is more useful. The searches across YouTube’s search bar allows you to take a keyword, topic, etc. and get actual searches related to it:
In the example above, I searched for “dessert recipes” which gives me 30 related keywords and an estimate of the search volume on YouTube for each.
As I scroll down, I see results like “healthy dessert recipes” “mango dessert recipes” and “quick dessert recipes”, all of which would make for great video titles and keywords in general to employ some SEO for YouTube around.
You can save any search term by clicking on the symbol on the left and it gets added to the “Saved” section. You can use this as a reminder for keywords you might want to use or just to find out more information on later using a free keyword tool.
If we click on the dots over to the right of any of these keywords, it provides a shortcut to the Google trends on that keyword.
Not surprisingly, we can see that searches for “dessert recipes” skyrocketed in March and April of 2020 when everyone was stuck at home and doing more cooking and baking.
The “search volume” amount only comes in a vague “high”, “medium”, or “low”.
These estimations are specific to YouTube, because I’ve looked up keywords in each of these tiers using Google’s keyword planner to get search volume estimates for these keywords in Google itself, and the results were not always consistent.
In other words, keywords which the YouTube analytics research feature lists as “low” often showed more search volume in Google itself than some of the keywords listing “medium” volume.
This makes sense given that some keywords are much more video friendly than others, so it’s something to keep in mind when comparing these estimates with those from a keyword tool.
In Summary
The YouTube analytics research feature is one to keep an eye on in the future to see if it can serve up more relevant information about our specific viewers.
In the meantime, we can use it to get ideas for keywords to base future videos around which are related to our niche.
The fact that this tool is taking into consideration the actual searches people are doing on YouTube and that information is coming from Google itself along makes it worth checking out when you’re not sure what to make your next video on.