Using Analytics to Learn What Works

Whether it's your website on Google, your posts or Facebook or videos or YouTube, most websites today will give you the option to read the analytics for your online content with the click of a button.

Click-Through Rate

The term ‘click-through rate’ refers to the rate at which viewers of your posts will also click on them to be taken to your website.

This can also be broken into the subcategory ‘link click-through rate’ which refers to people who click on a text link to be taken to a different page, rather than simply clicking on a picture or article. Link click-through rate is a more reliable method of measurement as it only refers to those who choose to click the link to be taken to your page, versus those who may have accidentally clicked on a picture. 

Define Your Target Audience

Analytics can give you a breakdown of your gender and age group of your viewers. This information is invaluable when deciding your target audience. You can learn if your target audience is engaging with your brand, or you might even learn to pivot to a new target audience if it turns out you’re doing particularly well with a certain demographic (learn more about identifying a target audience here). 

Evaluating Engagement with Your Videos 

Videos are a great way to gain traffic and advertise your business. On Facebook and YouTube, you can use analytics to evaluate the rate of engagement your videos have.

On YouTube a view is only counted if the person watches at least 30 seconds of the video. Views will not be measured if it is watched below this amount of time, if it is played while on AutoPlay or if the algorithm decides the views are displaying bot-like behavior (for example, jumping between the same few videos over and over).

When it comes to the ad spots they show on YouTube, it’s a little different. YouTube will keep track of when:

• Someone watches the entirety of an ad that’s below 30 seconds,
• Someone watches at least 30 seconds of an ad that’s above 30 seconds,
• Someone clicks through the ad to be taken to a different site.

On Facebook, however, a view is counted when someone has only watched 3 seconds of a video. As Facebook videos tend to play automatically as people scroll by this can lead to your video racking up hundreds of fake views. To get the real engagement number, thoroughly read the analytics page, as this will also display the total minutes of watch time spent on a video, the number of times a video was watched all the way through, the number of times a video was watched for at least 10 seconds, and average percentage of the video that was watched. 

All this combined will tell you exactly what sort of videos your audience likes and wants to see more of. More than that, it can track exactly when people stop watching, which can teach you the kind of content they are not interested in.