YouTube provides creators of kids’ content with a powerful toolbox of metrics to understand the performance of their brand’s channel. Key metrics include basic audience demographics but also allow creators to analyze watch time, audience retention, and audience engagement.

Leading kids’ channels such as CoComelon, Blippi, and Pinkfong have long been using YouTube analytics to grow their audiences and attract millions of subscribers, while newcomers like Moonbow Kids are looking to grow their audiences.

Understanding YouTube Analytics

YouTube Analytics helps your brand team understand how your videos are performing across the platform. If your team is new to publishing content on the platform, familiarize yourself with the analytics dashboard and how to drill down into more detailed information.

One of the most important metrics is watch time, which tells creators how much people are watching one specific video. Accumulating watch time is critical to many creators as it is one of the basic criteria YouTube uses to assess which channels can be monetized. Subscriber numbers are the other factor. Having a large number of subscribers but very little watch time will stop your brand from monetizing your content on the platform, although you may still benefit from creating connections with your audience.

Audience retention is equally important. Expressed as a percentage, audience retention shows you how much of a video most people watch or where they turn off. By analyzing audience retention, your team can see which parts of your video are connecting with your audience better than others.

Engagement shows you how many of your viewers are liking your content, commenting on it, and subscribing to your channel. If your content is generating comments, make sure you respond to all of them to continue to increase engagement.

Leveraging Your YouTube Channel’s Dashboard View

Your channel dashboard allows you to assess the performance of your most recent video at a glance. Accessed through the YouTube Studio tab of your channel, the dashboard ranks that video against the latest ten pieces of content published on your channel based on views since its publication. In addition, creators can see how click-through rates and the video’s average view duration compare to other content.

Moreover, the dashboard shows users the channel’s number of subscribers and how it has changed over the last four weeks. You can also quickly see the total number of views your videos have attracted and which videos have done best within the last 48 hours.

Analyzing Your Audience

Basic audience demographics are only a small part of the information YouTube Analytics shows users. Age, location, age, gender, and interests of your users allow you to better understand who is watching your content.

Beyond those basics, YouTube allows channel owners to see whether their content is mostly being watched by subscribers or others. They can also access information on where their channel’s traffic is originating from. YouTube searches, suggested videos, or external sources can all contribute to your channel’s growth.

Brands can analyze when their audiences are most active and most likely to engage with content on the platform. Timing new releases for those periods gives those videos a better chance of being discovered.

By using the audience information, your brand team can identify which types of content your target audience favors and deliver more of that content. For example, you may find that educational content outperforms purely entertaining videos. This will make it easier to plan future videos. Your team may also find that specific topics attract more interest than others. All of this information simplifies decision-making for future content.

Optimizing Content Based on Analytics

Optimization is the goal of monitoring content performance. Learning what works well for your audience is critical to growing that audience, attracting additional subscribers, and growing your brand.

It is equally important to analyze which pieces of content fail to connect to your audience and try to discover why. Your team may be able to edit the videos in question, or you may choose to forego specific forms of content in favor of more successful ones.

In most cases, brands need to monitor several pieces of content over time to recognize patterns and iterate continuously to maximize the potential of their kid-friendly YouTube content.

Understanding Unexpected Content Performance

Published eight years ago, Pinkfong’s Baby Shark Song has since attracted over 14 billion YouTube views. The video became the first ever piece of content to be watched more than 10 billion times and continues to rank as YouTube’s most-watched video.

So what made this song so successful and caused it to go viral far beyond its intended audience of young viewers? The song follows best practices associated with kids’ content, such as featuring a catchy melody, inventing the audience to join in with easy dance moves, displaying a colorful, adorable shark family, and having repetitive lyrics that are hard to forget. In short, the Pinkfong company created an earworm.

Analysis suggests that the song connected to parents as much as kids to reach such a wide audience. In addition, experts have pointed to the upbeat melody and the ease with which audiences can listen to the song repeatedly to explain its success. For the creators, these are important points to apply to future songs. Adding to that the data gained from YouTube Analytics may not land another song quite as successful, but it will allow Pinkfong to continue producing high-performing content.

Newer market entrants like Moonbow Kids use YouTube Analytics to understand why and how some of their videos reached audiences of over 10,000 based on less than 1,000 channel subscribers. Learning where those audiences come from can help the creators behind the channel target them specifically.

Conclusion

YouTube Analytics allows creators to learn why content is performing well and adjust existing and future content to forge stronger audience connections. By doing that, creators can lay the foundations for continued growth and build a brand that will be loved for generations.