What to Fix if Your Audience is NOT Growing on YouTube | Ep. 9

Your analytics tell you so much about what's working on your channel, but if your numbers are down, how do you know what to fix? Why isn't your YouTube channel growing? What can you do to get better results?

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Transcript

Meredith  0:00  
So your audience is not growing on YouTube despite your best effort to create decent content and publish consistently. Now what? Well, if you watched my last episode of the video, Brandon fusion podcast, you know that I opened up my analytics to show you 10 ways to tell what is working on your channel. And I promise to do a follow up on what to fix when you see that something's not quite working. Like, if you watched episode eight, and you opened up your analytics, and you're like, all the things that Meredith said to look for, are showing not working. What do I do? What do I change? What do I need to fix? Let's talk about it here on episode number nine of the video brand infusion podcast, my name is Meredith, I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business, for consistent revenue, without just pumping out videos, hoping for something to magically take off for you. Because that takes quite a bit longer. And we can kind of make some tweaks along the way. And if you didn't happen to catch episode eight, I hope you go back and watch or listen to that before this one. It's kind of a prerequisite because it's great. If you know what's working, you can just double down, you can just do more of that. But what do you do if there's stuff that you need to fix. So there are a number of metrics in your analytics that are more indicative than others meaning, like, if you go to the doctor's for just a regular checkup, or you have a cough that won't go away, and they take your blood pressure, and it's super high, or it's super low, they're gonna be like, Okay, forget about your cough, we need to address like, what's really going on here, there's definitely something we need to address, before we get to some of these other like weird things that you are having trouble with, right. And that's what I want to do today. And I have my phone pulled up here, and I'm going to record my screen for you and actually go back and forth between myself and my screen. Because one of the benefits of being a member of thriving creator society is this is what we do, I have a whole, like what to fix flowchart that helps you identify in your analytics, what to do, how to tell what needs to be fixed, what roadblocks are running up against, that's preventing growth, and then what to do to fix it. Maybe it's something you need to change about how you record your videos, or edit your videos. Or maybe it's something about the thumbnails or the titles, or maybe it's just in how you come up with the ideas. There's a whole flowchart that tells you what the problem areas are, and how to fix them. So I love diving into this stuff. And I'm going to go through a lot of the same things that I talked about in episode eight. But now we're going to look at it through the lens of if it's not working, what do I fix. So number one, on the first page of your analytics, you have this channel analytics area where it has your views, your watch time, your subscribers your estimated revenue, and it gives you those green solid up arrows. Or it'll give you a green checkmark, or it'll give you a gray, a down arrow. And this is a problem area that I want you to pay very close attention to. So that you can basically ignore it or at least not make judgments and decisions based on what you see here. And this is really the whole reason for last week's episode in this week's episode, you can just look at these four blocks and decide whether your channel is doing well or not well. And there's really nothing in those four blocks that give you any information about what to tweak or change or fix at all. So you have to take into account these are it's by default, just showing you the last 28 days. So if you open this up, and you're getting gray down arrows, you have to ask yourself, have you published any new videos in the last 28 days? Are they long form videos? And not shorts? Did you have a video do really well previously, and now it's comparing the data to the video that did really well, which sort of skews everything because now you have a new normal. Let me just give you an example. I'll move on to number two here with the latest publish content area. It just so happens that this video over how do I point to it over here this one, six things I quit to go from part time YouTuber to six figure business. If you look at how many views I have on this, it's a lot more compared to my normal. So these two up here are pretty normal 500 And then this one Has 20,000 This one has done great. This one has brought lots of new viewers and subscribers and comments to my channel. And I absolutely love it the algorithm is algorithm Ng, is that a word? It is now. And if I open up the analytics for this, you can see that it has a downgrade arrow for my average view duration, four minutes and 22 seconds, even though I know that's actually a pretty good average view duration. For me, it's just that lately, I've been creating a little bit longer videos, my podcast episodes are longer. So people have been watching longer, it's actually a pretty good number, you can take these numbers as fact, but you can't take them the judgment of the up arrows down arrows and stuff as good or bad really without looking at a bigger picture. So in episode eight, I did tell you that there is something you can look at here in your latest published content that you can actually change or tweak after the fact after you publish a video. So let me open this up and show you what I mean. And this is this is episode eight. This is the last episode 10 ways to tell was working on your YouTube channel so you can grow faster. And you can see that for the video performance. It's telling us in the first six days in six hours, we're getting 523 views 1.9%, click through rate, average view duration is five minutes, 21 seconds, there's nothing we can do about the average view duration, because we've already created the video. So we can't like re edit it, we can't reshoot it, we can't make it shorter, we can't add anything to it to like make people watch it longer. And that just kind of like is what it is. And there's obviously nothing we can manipulate really with the views. That's just what YouTube is bringing us that's the people that are watching, we could change the click through rate or attempt to change the click through rate. And the way that we would do this is just by swapping out the thumbnail, or changing the title. You could try both. But usually I'd recommend just doing one or the other. And I wouldn't do that with this, I'm getting the green checkmark, you know, it's fine, you can change your thumbnail and or your title, and hopefully increase your click through rate. And so all you have to do is log into your YouTube dashboard and swap it out. Just try something new, try something different. And again, like with this particular video, I probably wouldn't touch it in an attempt to improve it. Because the video itself is actually doing fine. The way that it is number three, I mentioned in episode eight that your comment section is a metric that you could look at to tell you that you're doing well that you're doing something well, if you're getting long comments from people or people that are thanking you like, this is a great video, thank you so much for showing me x, y and z, then you know that you're connecting with your audience in that way. And I don't necessarily know that the opposite is true. Like if you're not getting comments, you must not be connecting with your audience. I don't necessarily think that's true. I think it depends on the audience. I think it depends on the niche. And I think it depends a little bit on the context or the nature of how people are finding your videos. And whether or not you have some like longevity with, with your audience to where they feel like if they're leaving a comment, a comment or like sort of having a conversation with you. And so, I would wonder though, if you're not getting any comments ever. I wonder, are you asking? What do you think? Let me know down in the comments. Are you giving some kind of a call to action or a reason for people to leave a comment? Or are you just sort of waiting or expecting people to to do that now, I don't usually have a call to action. That's that's like leave a comment. I just sort of let it happen. And honestly, I have plenty of videos that do very well, like views wise and everything and even like gaining subscribers that don't really have a lot of comments. And it's just it just isn't a very conversation sparking video, I guess. And that's fine. That's

Meredith  9:36  
like, that's totally fine. So don't get down on yourself for not having comments, but but you may want to try and see. Is there something I could say to get people to engage with me here? Is there something I could say to get people to add to the conversation? Number four, one thing I mentioned was that looking at the number of leads that you're getting from your YouTube Chantelle is indicative of whether your YouTube strategy is working again, this is this is sort of depends on the niche, it depends on your audience, it depends what you're offering. As a lead magnet, I recently saw a question in a Facebook group from somebody who said that they've tried all these different lead magnets and freebies and their audiences and downloading them. And they, they don't really know what like, must be YouTube is just not a good place to grow your audience, which is not true. It's not true. And I talked about this in episode number three, I gave a lot of ideas for generating leads with your YouTube channel, like how to actually build your list with your content with your YouTube channel. And so I think what that really comes down to if it's not happening for you, if you're not getting leads, it's you're either not communicating what your lead magnet is doing for people, or what it can do for the person who's opting into it. You're they're not communicating the value of it, or you didn't create enough value like there's no, it's just not enticing enough for people to want to download it. You want to ask yourself, Okay, like, are the people that are landing on your opt in page opting in once they get there? Are they opting in? Is that working, but you just need to get more people there? Or is it a case of nobody's going to the opt in page because either the call to action that you gave was not clear, or you didn't have one, or you just have like a

Meredith  11:40  
link in your description, hoping people stumble upon it, you have to create something that people actually are willing to put their email address in for, make sure it's something people actually want. It's interesting, it's enticing. It's juicy, it's irresistible. Number five, let me switch back over here to my analytics, because in episode eight, we talked about views, and watch time. So again, you want to take this with a grain of salt, because you're really only looking at the last 28 days here. But if you go to let's click on views, and then click on the last 90 days, the top content, your top videos in the last 90 days, how do those topics, compare it to your current videos, the videos that you're publishing now. So like, you can see a lot of mine over here are a little bit older, some of them are from this year. Some of them are older than that. And so I have to look at these and go, is the content that I'm planning now to create now, for my audience? Is it like pretty much for the same type of people? Is it about the same type of topics? Do they all kind of fit under the same big umbrella? Yes or No? If the answer is yes, that's a good thing. If the answer is no, then you may have some content over here, that is basically bringing you the you know, quote, unquote, wrong viewer, you're not attracting bad people to your audience. But you might be attracting people with topics and content that are not those people are not interested in your current stuff. This is one of the things that I did years ago, when I really had to make like a hard pivot, not a super hard pivot, but I had to pivot my channel and I have a video about that, from way long time ago. But when I came into my top content here, what I noticed was the topics I was currently creating videos about at that time, were really not in line with the audience that I was attracting to my channel the most. So I had videos that were in my like top five, that were related to topics that I wasn't planning on creating videos about anymore. What I saw was those people were still hitting subscribe, not knowing that I might not checking out my whole channel, they're just saw one video and they hit subscribe. And they're like, Yeah, I would like more of this. But I wasn't creating more of that. And I didn't want to create more of that. And so it doesn't help me to have them hit subscribe. And this is where it kind of hurts. It kind of hurts a little bit. Because what I had to do was take some of my top content, not these ones, these are my current top content. I did take some of my top content and put those videos as unlisted. I didn't delete them. I didn't mark them as private. I don't want to remove them from YouTube because I don't want them to just simply be gone. There's it's still good content. So if someone has linked to it, or if it's embedded in a blog post somewhere or something, that's fine, but I didn't want the algorithm to keep seeing the value and pushing it out to more and more people because I didn't want the always more and more people, as my new subscribers on my channel because they weren't going to watch my new content. And that's going to send a whole lot of red flags to the algorithm. And so if you see that what you're currently publishing is not in line with what you see in your top content, you might want to take a look and enlist, or even just turn the comments off to sort of suppress the video and the algorithm a little bit to give your new content a chance at becoming your top content. So going back to, you know, looking at your views and watch time, this is an indication of how well, that personal librarian the algorithm is doing at getting your content in front of all of the right people. And so these two things kind of go hand in hand, I think, number seven, let's go in and look at retention graphs. This is where you start to analyze your like each individual video. And not just like your channel analytics as a whole. Let's just pick one here, let's pick pick the best note taking apps for 2020. For best AI note taking apps for 2024. So we have used we have watchtime. Come down here to audience retention, I have no idea what in the world that spike is. But 71% of viewers are still watching at around the 32nd mark, this is what we want to see this is a very good thing. We want to see that in the first 30 seconds, I'm holding people's attention the way that I do that, by the way, it's different for everybody. But the way that I do that is a short hook one or two sentences at the beginning of the video. And then I try to just get into it as quickly as possible. No long, one minute intros, no logo, animation, music, things that people have to sit through, you know, even for three seconds, three seconds is a lot out of 30 you want to analyze a bunch you want to look at your most recent videos, look at your best performing videos, figure out you know, are there some things you do in the first 30 seconds to a minute, or the first 15 seconds? Some things you do some things you don't do? Do they perform differently depending on if you do them or not, figure out what works and just start doing what is actually working. And if nothing seems to be working for your 32nd retention, then just get to the point just do a cold open, don't don't even say Hey, my name is Meredith blah, blah, blah, just say, hey, I want to show you how to do XY and Z, whatever it is that your video is about. And just start getting to the point. And then when you look at your like the longer audience retention of the whole video like I have over here, three minutes, 45 seconds, which is only 33.4% 50% is considered really good. For me 50% is almost unheard of for me. So it but this is very, this really depends. It depends on your audience, it depends on your content depends on your niche depends on you, it depends on your personality, and your shooting, and your editing and the game here, I think the way that I think of it is the game for audience retention is just to keep improving. Just keep improving. YouTube gives you your retention graph, you can see where people drop off. And when you study a bunch of your own videos, you can maybe tell that people drop off whenever you start saying X, Y and Z or whenever you start your intro or whenever you start your outro or, you know, whatever the case may be people drop off. Or maybe every time you show your screen or a funny meme, maybe you see that people actually stay a little bit longer. But the name of the game is to keep improving and study your retention graphs. And just try your best to improve from there. So this one's at 44.7% Look at these little up swings here. Up swings by the way in your analytics are usually means that people rewound to watch a section again. So what was I doing in those spikes? I don't know. But I'm gonna go in here and look and I'm going to see is there anything I can learn from this to apply to my future videos? Number eight, what we talked about in episode eight was Do you have Returning viewers versus new viewers like how is this looking for you? And this is such a tricky topic. And this is what I want you to kind of think about here is, who did you create your piece of content for?

Meredith  20:08  
Did you create it for your existing audience? Or did you create it with the intention of getting in front of a new audience? So let me show you an example here. This video I just published this as a last video, I published my three minute email marketing hack for YouTube creators dead simple email strategy. I created this video because the video I published before, I was talking about six things I quit, to go from part time YouTuber to six figure, business owner. And one of the things I shared was the six things I quit. But also the one thing that I did from the very beginning to help pave the way in that one thing was email marketing. And I got a lot of questions in the comments about email marketing, like how do you do it? How do you get started? How do you grow your list? And so I thought, Okay, well, let me follow up on that, because I had existing viewers who are asking these questions, so I created this video, specifically, for people who were already on my channel, they're already in my audience. They're already watching my videos. So if we go to video performance on this, and then we go to audience, like, look at this graph, you can see I have Returning viewers, to new viewers, it did exactly what I was hoping it would do. It got out to my Returning viewers, I get out to the people who are already on my channel. Whereas if you publish a video, that is like SEO optimized. And maybe you're like, I don't know if my existing audience is really interested in this, like, here's a good example, best AI note taking apps. This was just something that nobody in my audience was asking for. Nobody was asking me about AI note takers. But I was trying to figure out what are the best AI note takers because I bring in Otter into AI zoom calls. And I was like the is there a better option out there? I don't know. So I did the research and figured out that there aren't really many videos comparing all of these different notetakers and then telling people what the best one is. So seeing the keyword research, I was like, this is a good topic. It's relevant to me, it is relevant to my audience. It's not completely off the wall. So I did the research to figure out what are the best AI note takers, and I compared them on this video did awful when I first published it to my audience, it did absolutely awful. My normal audience was like, no. But over time, it got more and more new viewers, because it was SEO optimized because I did the keyword research. And I saw people are searching for this. But there aren't very many videos out there covering it. Of course, it's going to bring in new viewers. I engineered it to bring in new viewers because it's SEO optimized. So if you're looking at your Returning viewers versus new viewers grafts, you have to ask yourself, Who did I even make this for? To begin with, you even know who you made it for? Because if your SEO optimizing your videos, because you're trying to reach new people, and which is a great strategy, if you have a brand new channel, then you're going to hopefully see new viewers versus returning. But if you create a piece of content that's not so much SEO optimized, but it's like just something that you think your existing audience needs to hear or wants to hear or a topic they've been asking you about, then theoretically, your numbers would be switched, and possibly it does well enough for your audience that over time, YouTube, and the algorithm gets it out to more new and new people over time, once you've reached your existing audience. And that's just how, like, that's what you want to have happen. But if you're never really creating content for your existing audience, then it's really hard for the algorithm to see that the content you're creating has value because it's putting in front of your existing audience and they're like, now we're not really that interested in this number nine, of course, we have the old subscribers gained. We all want to see our subscriber counts going up on our channel. Now what do you do? If you're looking at your channel, dashboard, and you see your subscriber count is not going up. So first of all, let's not confuse gaining subscribers with the rate that you gain subscribers. As I pointed out several times before your subscriber count is really not connected with your future success on YouTube or your ability to generate revenue, you don't make money based on how many subscribers you have. It's just a social proof metric. It's a vanity metric. It's one of the reasons why, in episode eight, and in this episode, it's like one of the last things that I'm talking about, because it's really not that important. However, if you're creating content that has value for the audience that you are trying to attract to your channel, seeing that subscriber count go up is an indication that not only do you think your content has value, but also the new people you're attracting to your channel, think that your content has value. And so if that's not happening, then there's an obvious disconnect, right? There's a disconnect between what you think people want to see on your channel and what what people actually do want to see on your channel. But I do think that you can naturally work in calls to action in your videos, giving people a reason to subscribe, hey, if you like this video, by Guy lots more on my channel, make sure you hit the subscribe button, so you don't miss any of them. You know, something like that is an easy thing to do. But again, like I don't really think that it's necessary in order to get people to hit subscribe. So before I get to number 10, I also want to mention that I had said that there are certain metrics in your analytics that are more indicative than others. Right? So the subscribe metric is as a results metric that doesn't indicate that really doesn't indicate anything of like, what you could tweak or change or fix the metrics that are indicative? Are your click through rate are people clicking through? When they see your videos? Are they clicking play? That's all it really means is like, are the people who see your video as an option to click on? Are they saying, Yes, I'd like to watch that and then hitting play and watching it. That is a big metric to pay attention to. And you're gonna wonder what what's a good click through rate, Meredith, a good click through rate is, whatever is better than your current click through rate, that's the best click through rate is just whatever is better than you currently have. YouTube said something between like, two and 12% is considered normal. That's a huge gap there. Because if you think about it, if you can double your click through rate, you double your views. If you can go from 1% to 2%, you double your views, two to 4%, you double your views, four to 8% is a pretty big jump. But if you can get from one to two, two to three, three to four, four to five, five to six, it's just like one little tweak at a time, your thumbnails, your titles, they have to be enticing. They have to be interesting, they have to be intriguing, they have to get people's attention. And they have to be clear and specific. I have a lot of training on thumbnails inside thriving creator society, because I love digging into it. But it's it's it's something that you tweak over time, and you change and you improve on over time. There isn't like one thing that you can just decide, like, boom, I did this thing, and my thumbnails will suddenly are just like magical. The second thing is your impressions. And this is an often overlooked metric. In your analytics. Your impressions are the eyeballs that have an opportunity to watch your video. So when people are searching for something, and your video shows up as a search result, whether or not people click on it and hit play, it's showing up as an impression you have eyeballs on the video as an option. If it's in the recommended sidebar, if it's on YouTube homepage, whatever. Those are impressions. And we overlook this number quite a bit. I feel like my clients and students overlook the number of impressions. Because I don't know maybe it's just like not clear. I don't know where what is an impression, I'm not totally sure if your channel is not doing well. Or if you're you're not getting the results you want out of your channel and your channels not really getting very good impressions. And your impressions aren't increasing over time, then that would make sense. It's not like you're not even getting it in front of enough people to even have a chance for them to click on it to even have a chance to get those views and that watch time. So you want to look at like Are you are you going after seo keywords?

Meredith  29:55  
That's one strategy that is one single tactic, but if you have a brand new channel All, and you're thinking, oh, people are gonna find me through search results. Are you actually optimizing for those search results? are you actually doing keyword research to figure out what are people searching for? What are the real words that people are using? That they're typing into the search box? are you optimizing for that SEO can just happen on accident. But it also can be engineered, it can be optimized for that's why it's called SEO, search engine optimization. And some of this comes down to is your title and thumbnail enticing enough? But it's a little bit more like I want to say it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Because it's really is the topic. Interesting enough? Is the topic interesting enough, this video that I did on the six things I quit to go from part time YouTuber to six figure business. That wasn't an SEO topic. I didn't do any keyword research for that. I just thought this is an interesting topic. What the heck, you know, and so I just figured out like, how, how do I talk about going from part time YouTuber to six figure business, I could talk about six things I did. But that's not very interesting. So I figured, let's talk about six things I stopped doing, that's a little bit more interesting. Six things that I quit doing, to go from part time YouTuber to six figure business. So you can take a topic that you know, people are interested in that you know, your audience is interested in and just make it a little bit more juicy. So that when they see it, when they see the title when they see your thumbnail, they're like, Oh, well, that's a unique spin, I got to watch that. The third thing that I think is very indicative, is that the watch time the amount of watch time that you're getting, not your average view duration, or I should say, yeah, not your average view duration, your average percentage viewed, it doesn't really matter if it's 20%, or 70%. It's like how much watch time total is your content, gaining for the platform, because that's what benefits the platform is having people stay on the platform. That's how YouTube makes money. That's the game that YouTube is playing. So that has to be the game that you are playing. But ultimately, if you're growing your audience on YouTube to grow your business, then the ultimate results metric that you want to look at is your sales. And if you're creating YouTube content, and you're generating leads, but you're not generating sales of your course program, you know, digital product, then it's hard to know, is it because of something you're doing on YouTube? Or is it something to do with the offer itself or your sales page, or it's probably a lot of those things, honestly, however, it might just be that you don't have a clear flow of traffic, a clear path for your viewers to find your offers. And what this really comes down to is creating a set and forget a YouTube funnel on your channel. So that the content you create attracts your audience who eventually become your client or student or customer. So I'm going to queue up episode one for you over here. This is where I walk through my set and forget it YouTube funnel on my channel, how it works, how it looks, and how you can set one up for yourself so that as your audience grows, your income flows, I like to say as your audience grows, you're attracting the audience and community that you're trying to build that you want to build the people that you want to talk to every day and you want commenting on your videos every day and the people that you want to work with every single day and creating that path that journey for them to get more help deeper, deeper work with you beyond just your free content. It all happens with a set it and forget it YouTube funnel so I'll see you over there.