YouTube is one of the biggest websites in the world. In fact, it’s the 2nd most visited site after Google.

With nearly 2bn users spanning a range of demographics, the potential of YouTube is huge. From brands to self-made YouTubers, there is space for everyone on the platform. Of course that doesn’t mean everyone gets it right.

Data and analysis is always important for an effective YouTube strategy. If you don’t know where you’re going right or wrong, you can’t improve.

Check out this list of YouTube analytics tools below to see how you can get data, analyze it, and put it to work.

Who knows? Maybe this is the step you need to become one of the most-subscribed YouTubers on the platform.

YouTube Analytics

Why not start with the platform’s own analytics? YouTube offers a pretty in-depth offering for you to understand the performance of your video and the demographics of those watching them.

Found in the Studio section of your channel, YouTube Analytics chucks a lot of data at you, but with plenty of options to segment and drill down, it won’t take long to find some insights.

You can look at overall channel traffic over time to see how you’re performing against yourself historically. This is an excellent way to spot any peaks and seasonality you may want to incorporate into your ongoing strategy.

There’s also the option to look at your top performing videos, whether it’s by views or view duration. Along with that, you can find out where you’re getting your traffic from.

The Audience tab is very important too. Sometimes we might not be speaking to the people we think we are. This tab will give you info on your viewer’s age, gender, and location.

Get digging straight away. You’ll be surprised at what you find out.

Brandwatch Consumer Research

Our platform gives you access to a ton of YouTube data to analyze. Not only can you see what the response to your own content is, you’ll even see what the whole of YouTube is talking about.

For example, you could set up a query that tracks all mentions of your brand on YouTube, both in video titles, descriptions, and comments. You could quickly build a dashboard visualising this data looking at the major topics relating to your brand, where it’s being mentioned, and the sentiment and emotion around it.

This means you can also look at:

  • Mentions over time
  • Reach of your marketing campaigns
  • New areas to build content around

Speaking of content, you could also set up queries and rules to track the comments on your own specific videos. This means you can see what people are saying, (you could even group certain videos into categories), how they feel about it, and what other topics they’re bringing up.

Finally you can bring all that together into a custom dashboard that suits your needs.

Essentially, it’s an incredibly powerful tool for understanding what people really think of your brand and your videos. It’ll help inform your future content strategy, and improve your video offering.

BuzzSumo

A new addition to the YouTube analytics game, BuzzSumo, the popular content marketing tool, has released their YouTube Analyzer. There’s a strong range of features available that you can use for tracking your own performance, analyzing specific videos, and keeping an eye on competitor channels.

For finding ideas for your own videos, you can chuck in a keyword and get a list of the most popular videos for that topic. Specifically you can rank them by views, comments, and up or down votes. For example, in about two seconds, I found the most viewed video about Game of Thrones is this one, with 21m views.

You can also use that same function, but for a specific YouTube channel to see what their most popular (or least popular) videos are too.

There’s a bunch of other features too, which are all detailed here. It’s an excellent tool well worth a look.

Social Blade

Want to get a quick analysis of your channel, including historical changes in subscribers and views? Social Blade is the tool for you.

It’s a simple offering, and entirely browser-based, but it’s powerful and insightful nonetheless. Simply chuck in your YouTube channel name and get stats on subscribers, views, and your ranking within your category. You can even get future projections and find similar channels.

There’s nothing stopping you putting in your competitors channels too. This will give you a good idea of how they’re performing, and what they’re up to. Great if you’re looking to take them on. There’s even a compare option so you can put you and your rival side-by-side to see who has the edge.

Tubular Intelligence

Tubular ticks a lot of boxes, from seeing what’s trending on YouTube to the performance of your videos. With customers including Mattel and Activision, they’re doing something right.

For a start, you can analyze your own channel and get the usual details on subscriber counts, but Tubular also offers its own demographic data around location, gender and age. Plus they’ll show you other videos and creators that your audience watches.

You can then do the same with any other channels too. Handily Tubular also segments channels by content genre, such as gaming or entertainment, giving you instant global leaderboards for various industries.

This is excellent for benchmarking and finding influencers you might want to work with. Beyond that, you can build yourself a dashboard to get everything important in one place.