In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris answer a question from the MarketingProfs B2B Forum on how YouTube analytics data can be used for B2B marketing – and how YouTube itself fits into your B2B marketing strategy. Watch and listen for tips on how to do YouTube research to inform your YouTube strategy as well as how to download and use YouTube analytics data.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher Penn 0:02
This is In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast.
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we’re talking things YouTube YouTube analytics specifically, and got a question actually was left over from the MarketingProfs B2B Forum this year.
How should we be thinking marketers about YouTube analytics for B2B marketing? Because a lot of the times, you know, with B2B, you have much longer sales cycles and things what’s the impact? So Katie, I know we’ve talked about YouTube analytics extensively, because we obviously have this podcast, we have our live stream and stuff.
And we don’t necessarily see YouTube show up in our, our direct conversions, right, or even in our multi touch attribution model able to see the meat level, but you’ve been of the opinion that it does have value.
And have you ever been encouraging me to pick up my daily show and start that up again? So from a B2B marketing perspective, what is it you think about YouTube analytics that makes it incomplete that you think there’s a there there, even though our current models don’t show that?
Katie Robbert 1:08
Well, I want to step back a little bit and sort of talk about the utility of YouTube for a B2B marketer.
And so this is a conversation I’ve had with a couple of my friends, who are also B2B marketers.
And their first thought is, well, I don’t want to have to sit on camera all day, I don’t want to create videos of myself.
And I think it’s that misconception that a video has to feature you, it has to star you as the main focus.
And we’ve done tutorials and walkthroughs, and demos that we’re not even on camera, you can just sort of have the voiceover webinars, you know, whatever the thing is, and so I think, first and foremost, you can ask a beating marketer, you should be creating videos that demonstrate your expertise, but you yourself don’t have to be front and center and camera ready, you know, you can have a presentation up, you know, pretend you’re teaching your team, you know, a skill, it can be, you know, a 32nd video, like a little snippet, or pro tip.
And so with that, with it, with the way that I think about YouTube, it’s an introduction to who you are, it’s an introduction to what your business does, it’s an opportunity to showcase and that to me, is awareness.
And awareness is something that typically at least, that I’ve seen falls to social media channels, if you’re B2B.
And I consider YouTube a social media channel.
So that sort of the way that I think about it is put YouTube in the awareness bucket at the top of the funnel, and share those videos across different platforms, but use them as a Hi, we’re Trust Insights, this is what we do.
Here’s more about us, here’s all our videos on change management, here’s all our videos on, you know, Google Analytics and explaining.
So that’s where I feel like YouTube might not show up at the bottom of the funnel with the conversions, which is where a lot of our attribution models focus, but it does, it should be showing up as an awareness.
And so we should be seeing it as a channel that drives traffic to our website.
Christopher Penn 3:16
When you use YouTube, as a consumer, putting aside the marketing perspective, how do you use, let’s exclude pure entertainment? Like, that’s excluding I’m just gonna watch some Foo Fighters videos, when you’re using YouTube with some intent, how do you use it?
Katie Robbert 3:30
I use it as instructional.
And so, you know, we’ve used the example of baking bread, you know, as an analogy, well, not so much figuratively, figuratively, but literally, I go to YouTube to learn how to bake bread.
And so for me, it’s watching people, you know, with the kneading techniques, or watching, sort of to see what I can expect the dough to look like, or how much I should be rising, because if I’ve never done it before, I don’t have a point of reference.
And so I, it’s helpful to have that visual cue of like, in three hours, this is how big it should be.
You know, I’ve used YouTube to figure out how to fix the internet connection on my TV.
And so there was a whole tutorial video on how to safely take apart my Smart TV and fix one of the cables so that the internet could keep connecting.
And so I use, you know, aside from watching, you know, music videos, I use it as instruction, so teaching me how to do something, um, you know, I’ve used it to, you know, scope out campsites because, you know, people love to take videos of what they’re doing.
And so if I can sort of see as like a visual point of reference, what to expect when I go to a campsite, campsite, I’ve never been to I’m like, Okay, this is the kind of stuff I’d need.
This is the space I might have.
So I use it as instructional and educational.
Christopher Penn 4:55
That’s really interesting, because from an analytics perspective, we think about YouTube analytics, you get stuff like views, you get stuff like impressions, you get, you know, video completion, all the behavioral aspects of the video.
But the way you’re describing it, if we think about the marketing operations follow and the different types of search, it is what you’re doing is actually closer to the end of the funnel than the beginning, right? You’re not searching for should I go camping to alleviate my my stress of business? Right? You identify the problem.
You’re not even searching for, you know, what are ways to relieve my stress work, right? You’ve identified the problem, you identify the solution, it’s camping.
And now you’re it’s it’s, you know, from awareness to consideration.
Now you’re in evaluation almost which camping site should I go to? Or, and this is something that I never hear in relation to YouTube analytics, and and the way you’re talking about makes me think about it.
We’re always talking about the customer journey.
But like, 95% of the time when marketers say that they really mean the buyers journey.
They don’t mean the owners journey.
And when I hear you talking about, you know, making bread and stuff, you already own the oven that this that what you’re doing owners journey searches, how do I make this thing that I own more valuable to me than 50 pounds of flour? What do I do with it? You know, how do I do these things.
And from an analytics perspective, that means look, we were talking about on a previous episode, you have KPIs for each stage of the buyers journey, you have KPIs for each stage of the owners journey.
And if you’re going to be using YouTube analytics properly, you have to be doing correlation analysis at each stage.
Okay, do YouTube analytics, the views and impressions and subscribers and stuff? at which stage in the end the total customer journey, do they have the strongest correlation? Because from what I’m hearing, you say, it sounds like for some companies, it could be a very strong customer retention metric.
Katie Robbert 7:02
I think that you know, I think you’re exactly right.
And so in thinking through the way that I was describing it, you’re right, I’m not looking for, you know, someone to hire, I want to do the thing myself, I already own the thing.
I already own the camping gear, I own the flower and all the other stuff.
I need someone to show me how to use the thing that I already have.
And so you’re absolutely right.
YouTube is a great retention, you know, and you find those channels on YouTube of content creators who have been helpful, and you’re like, Oh, let me see what else they can help me with.
And so there’s one recipe channel, one cooking channel, rather, where I really like the chef, he’s never I’ve never seen him, he’s never been on video.
It’s always just him making a thing.
But explaining it in such a way that it’s very simple, not condescending, assumes that you don’t know a lot, but it also treats you respectfully, I guess, is the way to describe it.
Like it’s not like, you know, let me explain what flour is You dummy.
You’ve never heard what it is.
There’s assumptions of what you understand.
But then there’s also an authenticity, he shows you when it doesn’t work out.
He’s like, this is what I did.
If you do it this way, this is how it’s not going to work.
So if that’s if that’s the result you get, that’s probably what happened.
Let me go ahead and do it again, and show you the right way.
Once I learned from my own mistakes, and those are the types of content creators that I gravitate toward, because of that authenticity, we all, you know, mess things up.
And actually seeing the imperfections, means I want to see more of it, because it’s likely to happen to me.
And so that, for me is like my retention, I keep going back to the same content creators because I’m getting something out of it.
And I’m learning something.
Christopher Penn 8:54
It’s interesting, because now I think about we know this intuitively, like when we produce reports for several of our customers, we record video walkthroughs of them.
Those are don’t show up in our YouTube analytics while they do technically, but we don’t count them because they’re really not intended for the general public.
They intended for like five people.
But we know that if even two of the five people who sent it to watch it, it’s done its job.
And so I think that changes how we need to think about YouTube analytics.
I think it changes how we need to think about using the data in there.
Because when I think about what’s in YouTube analytics, it’s actually I think it’s missing a lot of stuff.
I think it’s missing stuff that we’re we don’t think about and yet would be relevant.
So I’m going to pull up YouTube analytics here.
And if you’re listening to the podcast, you can find this the video I’m sharing over at trust insights.ai/youtube That’s the URL.
And so this is a standard YouTube studio interface.
Nothing special.
There’s no no you know, crazy New stuff here.
And these are all the different things that we get average view duration, watches, views, subscribers, gain subscribers lost likes and dislikes comments on the video clicks on cards.
And it seems to me that this is missing stuff that is really critical to understanding how YouTube analytics fits into our customer journey.
Specifically, we can’t look at any of the numbers that we have, by the topic of the video, or what we say in it.
Because we like we can only see here’s the top video.
So I’m looking, for example, the top videos on my channel in the last 28 days how to use Google Analytics to measure LinkedIn, which is a five year old video now that probably needs to be to retired and replaced Bose QuietComfort earbuds, noise cancellation test, solo farming ash inverter that’s like 14 years old at this point, an episode of so what business core competency? You ask I answer so.
And from a topic perspective, these are five wildly different topics.
But I do see that a lot of these You ask I answer videos and as you know, showing some good long tail growth.
But the topics are in in there.
But topics are not provided as dimensions we would have to engineer that ourselves to say this is a video about Google Analytics.
This is a video about regression analysis is a video about Google Analytics, four etc.
And so maybe as we think about YouTube analytics, we need to be thinking less about just the the numbers themselves and the nuances in the numbers, as well as where we map it to in the customer journey, which is a lot more work
Katie Robbert 11:43
in YouTube.
Um, I guess so in as we’re talking about the owner’s journey and using it for retention.
Are you able to see returning users? And are you able to because I know so one of the things that we started to do is break down our videos by playlist.
Can you see numbers for those playlists specifically, so that you can say, Oh, my Google Analytics playlist seems to be more popular than my SEO playlist?
Christopher Penn 12:14
No, um, you would have to do the bucketing yourself, and then count on the metrics count with that data.
And yeah, you can’t see new versus returning can only see the views themselves.
So you can see the people who have subscribed to your channel after watching that video, which is a good general proxy for the value of the video.
If you go to your example.
Or if you watch this thing for this person, like, wow, it was really great.
And you got to hit that subscribe button because you want more from that person.
But you can’t see new versus returning
Katie Robbert 12:49
that so to your point about missing metrics, that to me is one, you know, as we’re talking about retention is a missing metric.
And so it’s great to get new users in that’s, you know, where we started.
That’s the awareness.
But then that retention of people continuing to come back.
And so as we think about it, in context of B2B marketers, one of the things that we know is that people are so nervous about giving away their secret sauce of telling people how to do the thing.
Well, if I tell them how to do it, then they won’t hire me.
That’s just not true.
Because not everyone has the resources to do the thing.
They may understand how to do the thing, but not want to do the thing.
They may not have someone in house who can do the thing.
And so being able to show someone what’s in the box how to do it doesn’t mean that you won’t continue to get business for the thing.
What it shows people is that you know what you’re talking about.
And so when they have that problem, they’re like, Oh, well, Chris knows how to set up Google Analytics for I’ve seen him do 600 videos on it.
He probably knows what he’s talking about.
So I’m going to hire him to do that for me now.
And so I think we as marketers have to be less concerned about giving away our secrets and more concerned about demonstrating our expertise.
Christopher Penn 14:08
Jay Baer says this very famously, a lot of talks, and it’s true, and the analogy works.
Having the recipe doesn’t make you a chef, right, just because I watched the video on YouTube on how big sourdough bread does not mean that okay, I’m done buying bread.
Oh, it’s true.
Katie Robbert 14:24
I made pasta dough last week, for the first time.
I looked at recipes, I watched videos and let me tell you, it still came out terrible.
And so that then, therefore, I’m not going to stop buying pasta anytime soon.
I’ll continue to work on it.
You know, but just because I watched a video doesn’t make me an expert, doesn’t mean I can do the thing myself.
Christopher Penn 14:48
That’s true.
And also I it’s very relevant to B2B.
But this is true in general.
If somebody is so adamant that they are going to watch the video, and then they don’t have to buy from you, you know, they’ll, they can stick it to the man, right? They’re not going to be a very good client, they’re not going to be a very good customer, they’re going to nickel and dime you to death on everything, as opposed to Katie, what you were saying, which is, yeah, they may know how to do it, but they just don’t want to, they want somebody else to do it for them.
They don’t have the team, they don’t have the talent and have the time.
They just do it for me, here’s five grand or 10 grand or 100 grand, just do it for me, please.
It’s the same reason why your restaurants exist.
It’s not because we’re incompetent.
It’s because we just don’t feel like cooking tonight.
Katie Robbert 15:39
Right? And so it doesn’t mean that, you know, nobody’s ever gonna cook again, it just means today, I just want to break from it.
If you take it even a step further, you know, then why do schools exist? Why bother teaching anybody anything, if you’re so afraid that someone’s gonna do it better than you are different than you like, then don’t teach anybody anything ever like, and that’s just a ridiculous statement.
And so teaching someone how to do something doesn’t mean that they won’t then ask for your help or buy it from you.
It just means that you’ve shown, I know what I’m doing.
I know what I’m talking about.
And right now, there’s so many people who don’t, who get away with, you know, not demonstrating their expertise, but are just really charismatic speakers, but they don’t really say anything, being able to break it down to its most simplest form of step one, I do this step two, I do this, I can watch a video on how to rebuild my car engine, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do it myself, it’s probably a terrible idea.
And so in watching that video, doesn’t mean I’m never going to go to the mechanic.
Again, if anything, I’m going to see how complicated it is.
And I’m going to definitely want to go to a mechanic after watching the video.
And I think the same is true with our B2B marketing.
And so the more I learned, Chris, from you about how to properly set up an email campaign, it’s not enough to just write like a quickie email with a funny subject line, you know, you have to think about the deliverability, you have to think about the cleanliness of your list, you have to think about the servers themselves, and all of those things that I just don’t want to do.
And so guess what, I’m going to hire you to do it every single time because the more I learn about it, the less I want to do it.
Christopher Penn 17:27
That’s fantastic.
So if you’re a B2B marketer, and you want to see this in your in your, you want to see the use of YouTube analytics, there’s a couple things you need to do.
First, you will want to be able to download the data out of YouTube itself, because YouTube does not integrate well with many marketing automation systems.
To the extent that you can, we recommend putting YouTube videos embedded in content on your website.
The reason for that is pretty simple.
Your marketing automation system will track pages on your website.
And if you know which pages have YouTube videos on them, then you can automatically say, okay, these pages, have videos.
And if these pages do a better job of converting the pages without videos, then you have a good sense of YouTube’s qualitative impact on the ability to lift a page as ability to convert.
And then the, the thing that, again, gets ignored so much in, in our marketing, but especially in B2B marketing is talk to the customer, and ask them, Hey, have you watched any of our YouTube videos? If the answer’s no, after you know, three months, or six months or nine months of doing this, then okay, probably YouTube’s not working for you.
Or you’re not producing content the customer wants, ask them okay, well, what would you like us to make videos for you? And if the customer said I’d rather read blog posts, and you have your answer.
But if the customer says I really wish you would make a how to video about X, it now becomes pretty obvious what you should do.
And your YouTube analytics will then reflect that because if your video is titled, how to clean your email list, if your video is titled how to use Google Analytics for attribution, and those videos do really well, then you know what to be creating for YouTube, and you will see the impact of YouTube on your B2B marketing
Katie Robbert 19:18
to analytics questions for you, Chris? Number one, if you embed the YouTube video on your site, can’t isn’t there a certain type of goal that you could set up that is like, watched a video and so that would be one metric? And then the other metric I’m wondering about that actually really just escaped me.
I thought it was a really good question too.
Dang it.
Christopher Penn 19:43
Well, let’s tackle that first one, what you think about okay, um, yes.
In fact, in Google Tag Manager, not only can you track whether somebody watched a video or not, but it has YouTube integration built in no surprise, it’s a Google property.
And you can measure the percentage of the video that somebody watched so so you know, when we put up this episode of The Podcast on the Trust Insights website in at Google Analytics, we could see, did people on average get to 50% of the show? And then they’re out 75% show? Do they watch the whole show? At what point do we lose people.
And you can see that both in YouTube natively, but also in if you set up Tag Manager properly, you’ll see it in Google Analytics in the events.
Katie Robbert 20:20
So I remembered my other question.
So YouTube is not only a social media channel, but in effect, it’s a search engine.
And so you can look at YouTube on Google Trends, for example.
So you can find out what people are searching for, and the timing of when they’re searching for those things.
So very similar to creating your text based content.
You can also from Google search, you can also look up YouTube statistics to find out topics that people are looking for.
So you can use your exact same keyword list that you would use for creating BlogTalk content for creating your youtube content creation list.
Chris, it looks like you’re pulling up something on your screen.
But basically, you know, you can use YouTube as a secondary search engine.
So the way that you do SEO for your blog content, you would want to do something similar for YouTube as well to figure out timing and the kinds of things people are looking for.
So you should definitely be using Google Trends to look at YouTube data.
And then you should be looking at it looks like you have this in Search Console.
Can you hook up YouTube to your search console?
Christopher Penn 21:36
So this is a really good question.
You don’t have to hook up YouTube, just like Google Trends.
You see here, this is my Google search results performance.
And here’s search type Web.
I’m going to switch from web to video.
And now I can see, is there any performance? Over 82 clicks? 2900 impressions? And guess what? These are some of my YouTube video titles.
Hmm.
So now, go ahead.
Katie Robbert 22:07
I was gonna say so this tells you what people are searching for and how they’re finding your videos.
Christopher Penn 22:12
Exactly.
Now, this is still, these are the videos that are on my website.
So this is not on my YouTube channel.
But to your point, if you use Google Trends to figure out the broad appeal of a topic, and then you dig in here in Search Console to figure out okay, what are the things that people are really interested in, that I have videos for that are searchable, you can see where the gap is.
So like, when I look at this, there’s a lot in here a lot of questions about Microsoft clarity, and I’ve done a couple videos on it.
It looks like I need to do more, it looks like I need to do a Microsoft Cloud in depth review or the way it was we used for our clients, because this isn’t my site.
And because I’ve got search type video, this is what shows up in Google search results.
In You know, when you type a search into Google and you see those, there’s like all the different sections of the page, there’s that little string of videos, these are my videos that are showing up there.
And so from a YouTube analytics perspective, this is not YouTube data.
But these are videos that I show up in Google search for that, guess what if I’m a B2B marketer, and I’ve got how to videos for, like product stuff, if I do a good job with this, I can intercept those how to inquiries before somebody goes and finds a competitor, because the videos show up at the top of search results before the actual search results on the page.
So from an SEO perspective, this is really important.
This is stuff that you want to keep track of and should be part of your overall YouTube analytic strategy.
Katie Robbert 23:41
So before you close out that screen, Chris, can you just pull up Google Trends really quick.
And again, for those who are listening to the podcast, you can find this walkthrough on our YouTube channel TrustInsights.ai AI, slash YouTube, YouTube.
And so if you search for, you know, put in Microsoft clarity, just as an example, into Google Trends.
The point here that I’m trying to make is that as you pull up Google Trends, you can switch web search to YouTube search.
And so you know, if there’s enough data for it, people don’t seem to search for it a lot.
But, you know, you can take a topic that you care about as a B2B marketer, and try to find out, okay, are people even looking for this on YouTube? And if they are, is there any kind of trend or seasonality that I should be thinking about in terms of creating the content? Um, you know, and so maybe Microsoft clarity is not the best, you know, exam to
Christopher Penn 24:46
actually use look at the data, you can see that, you know, obviously there were announcements along the way and it is starting to pick up steam it and it’s, it’s I set this to worldwide because anytime, you know, Google Trends I think defaults to the locale that you’re in.
If I want to attract traffic from different regions, I might want to create videos where those searches are popular in those other regions, as long as my YouTube accounts not creating geo locked videos, you know what you have to do intentionally, I could find, to your point, YouTube being the largest search second largest search engine in the world, I could find new audiences this way, that I wouldn’t be able to find that maybe it’s a super competitive term in regular search.
But I can get around that by being popular in YouTube search.
Katie Robbert 25:36
And so there’s definitely more than meets the eye with using YouTube and B2B marketing.
And so, you know, to start to wrap up, think about YouTube as not only an awareness channel, but also in a retention channel.
And so how are you using it for yourself and for your company? Are you using it to teach people things? Or are you using it just to be a talking head and, you know, show off all the times that somebody caught you on video.
So really, think about your intention with the channel, and then start to map your metrics to what that intention is.
And so for us, it sounds like there’s two things one is awareness so people can learn about us.
But two is that retention so that people can learn how to do the thing, either for themselves or in my example, learn that you want nothing to do with the thing and you still want to hire Chris to do it for you.
Christopher Penn 26:31
If you’ve got comments or questions on anything we’ve talked about in today’s episode, you can have a discussion about it with us and with over 2100 other marketers in our free analytics for marketers slack group, go to trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, and join today free of charge, no cost very little personal information collected and we’re all very friendly.
And wherever it is that you watch or listen to this show.
If there’s a child you prefer to have it on except Facebook, you can find us at trust insights.ai/ti podcast again, that’s trust insights.ai/ti podcast for where you can find this show in other places.
Thanks for tuning in.
We’ll talk to you soon.
Take care.
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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