Considering the current popularity of video content, YouTube is a powerful platform for brand marketing. With 2.6 billion monthly active users, YouTube generates the second-highest traffic of any website worldwide, second only to Google.
According to the Social Media Examiner’s industry report, 55% of marketers use YouTube, making it the most used video channel for video marketing.
Now imagine if your brand didn’t leverage such a powerful platform. And if you do, what if you aren’t seeing it translate to a higher number of subscribers? Or worse, you see a dip in followers!
While YouTube offers its dashboard for analytics, it does not have competitor analysis features. In this article, we will dive into the best ways to analyze your competitors on YouTube without solely lying on the platform’s limited dashboard.
Let’s start by answering the most important question.
What is YouTube competitor analysis?
YouTube competitor analysis is the evaluation process of your YouTube content with that of your competitors. You focus on relevant metrics to track your rival brand’s marketing activity on this popular video-sharing platform.
YouTube competitor analysis focuses on gathering relevant data on engagement, views, video type, posting schedules, etc., and generating insightful reports. This helps in growing your audience base and improving your brand value on YouTube.
In the screenshot above, you’ll notice how even though Notion posts less frequently, their engagement remains higher than Monday.com which leads to them gaining more subscribers.
5 Benefits of tracking and analyzing competitors on YouTube
Here are some notable benefits of conducting a YouTube competitor analysis:
1. Helps identify competitors
To stay on top of the popularity on YouTube and outperform other brands, you must know who your competitors are. Social listening is an important part of competitor analysis that allows you to track what your core audience and your followers are talking about. This helps you filter out potent competitors in a sea of aspiring and established brands.
Through accurate YouTube analysis, you can gauge which brands are getting the most attention and accordingly map out your marketing strategy to compete with them. It not only allows you to examine your existing competitors but also identifies emerging brands in the market.
2. Helps set performance benchmarks
There is no lack of alternatives in the current market. In such a landscape, the only way to reach your target audience is to ensure that you are constantly striving to do better than your rivals.
To achieve that, evaluating your performance without a benchmark won’t deliver excellent results. You must compare your progress against that of your competitors to bring positive and quantifiable change in your marketing strategy.
YouTube competitor analysis allows you to compare the quality and popularity of your content side-by-side with your top contenders. You get an exact idea of what you need to work on to establish yourself as a consistent and trusted brand on YouTube.
Besides marketing campaigns, competitor analysis also helps you improve your product and services by setting up benchmarks that align with what your audience demands.
3. Shows opportunities to pursue
A YouTube competitor’s analysis tracks down popular trends for you to join as a brand. Every YouTube trend becomes an opportunity to reach a wider audience and establish the potential of your products and services.
You can choose trends that align with your brand image while simultaneously allowing potential customers to interact with you in a fun way.
Competitor analysis also shows what type of content has the most appeal to your market segment. You learn from YouTube’s top-performing brands and never miss out on a grand opportunity of enhancing your digital presence.
4. Streamlines your YouTube marketing strategy
Analyzing your top competitors on YouTube puts things into greater perspective. It shows you what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to build a firm foundation based on ‘trial and error’ — the key difference here being that you are not making the error but simply learning from it.
Analyzing the top brands shows you what to prioritize, what type of content to focus on, and what the schedule should look like. As you examine what makes your rival brand’s content click, you can incorporate those elements into your strategy. It also helps you figure out what trends to choose to grab attention while still reflecting the purpose of your brand.
5. Eases search for trending topics in your niche
YouTube competitor analysis shows you the top-performing videos. This allows you to examine their content and identify niche-specific topics that resonate with your target market. Instead of running here and there and jumping on every trending bandwagon, you get to focus your resources on topics that are most relevant to your audience.
6. Cost-effective solution
Outsourcing competitor analysis has multidimensional results. Comparison of your performance with your competitors is not its only role. The process also monitors relevant audience conversations, identifies gaps accurately, and conveys what the market needs from your brand.
Such precision in providing business intelligence comes at a very low cost with YouTube competitor analysis. Brands get the best insights without investing too much, optimize their existing resources, and can confidently concentrate on improving their marketing.
In this fast-paced business world, time is money. But manual competitor analysis is complex and error-prone. Any mistake will cost the company a hefty sum.
This is where an effective analysis tool can make an enormous difference. In fact, many marketers choose to work with tools like Keyhole. With its social listening skills and superior analytics features, Keyhole provides competitor tracking services through budget-friendly packages.
How to do a YouTube competitor analysis in 5 steps
Here’s how you can do a YouTube competitor analysis in 5 steps:
Step 1: Identify your stiff competitors
Brands usually know who their top competitors are in the market. For YouTube competitor analysis, you need to see if their channels are your competition in the digital space, too.
The goal of conducting a marketing campaign on YouTube is to drive quality traffic to your site. The videos are only a touchpoint to establish a funnel of customer acquisition. Here, you need to keep two factors in mind: the traffic a page receives and how much of it transfers to the original brand site. The YouTube leaders in your industry generate the most traffic in both directions.
In addition to identifying competitors manually, you can enhance your research by using a web scraping proxy to gather and analyze data more efficiently from multiple YouTube accounts and videos.
You can identify your competitors by surfing through the platform (like in the screenshot below), doing an account search using keywords, monitoring and using relevant hashtags, and examining the trending YouTube shorts.
Step 2: Analyze their video content
On the journey of making a recognizable brand identity on YouTube, your competitors are your best teachers. If top brands’ video content is going viral and bringing in new followers every day, they already know how to deliver the right videos at the right time and stay ahead of the game.
Hence, if you want to see your brand among the top brands on the site, you must enhance your content and align it with the changing market needs.
Once you know who your competitors are, gather data on relevant metrics and analytics. The results will tell you what your audience wants.
Step 3: Track basic metrics
A video’s purpose is to drive quality traffic to your site. On YouTube, the clips function as a touchpoint in your customer acquisition funnel. Start by searching for the trending organic search terms specific to your niche.
Identify the keywords that drive the most traffic to your top competition. This will help you understand what metrics you need to concentrate on.
Suppose you are curating “how to” videos for your juice brands. To gauge what should be the highlights in your videos, track your competitors by examining what content elements in their “how to” videos drive the most viewership and what posting schedules brought them the most traffic.
Step 4: Examine their audience
You and your competitors may have an identical target market. So while tracking their progress, understand what segments of the audience they are curating content for. Check how your contenders interact with the audience, their tone, and the frequency of their communication.
Here, you need to leverage social listening to monitor online interactions. See what type of YouTube visitors interact with your competitors the most and what they say while talking about their favorite products.
Consider those insights while chalking out your marketing strategy. This will make you plan more target-focused, optimize your resources, and refine your brand marketing efforts.
Step 5: Check their activity
Tracking their audience is not enough. You need to monitor everything your competitor is doing on YouTube for their brand. You must monitor the competitor’s post frequency, content tonality, and video formats.
Examine what sort of videos bring the most traffic to their channel. Is long-form content popular with their audience? Or are YouTube Shorts more suited to their taste? In case long-form content is the star of their channel, see if they wrap the video up in 10 minutes or less or if they produce longer explainer videos.
Check their page thoroughly and see what queries their audience throws at them. Prepare extensive answers to each. This way, your YouTube marketing strategy will have the best possible implication.
Remember that the process needs to be continuous. Keeping up with the pace is the key to going head-to-head with the top rankers in an already crowded platform, and that takes accuracy and efficiency. Otherwise, you might miss out on significant changes in your rival brand’s activity and compromise the entire process.
If you are targeting sustainable growth, best to skip manual processes and opt for a competitor analysis tool.
The only YouTube competitor analysis tool you need
In a rapidly developing market, brands cannot afford delays in tracking competitors. Efficiency and effectiveness here depend on how well you can leverage technology.
Sounds complex? It doesn’t have to be. Keyhole offers a range of features that will help you conduct the complete process in just three simple steps. Let’s analyze:
Step 1: Add the YouTube profiles of your competitors to Keyhole’s Profile Analytics
First, log into your keyhole account and click on the ‘Profile Analytics’ tab.
As shown in the above picture, it will take you to a new page. On the right-top corner, there will be an orange button showing “Add New Profile”. Click on it and select the “Analyze New profile” option.
Now, a new page with several social media options will appear for you to track. Select the YouTube one.
Just like the above screenshot, a new page will open. Here, first, add your YouTube channel and then add the competitor page you want to track.
Once that’s done, you will see the “create comparison” button turning orange. Click on it, and you will see Keyhole automatically backfills the data.
Step 2: Create a comparison report
The goal of a YouTube competitor comparison report is to assist you in identifying trends, curating better video content, scheduling better posting time to ensure the best possible engagement, etc. With Keyhole, generating such a report becomes a cakewalk.
Once Keyhole backfills the data on your and your competitor’s engagement on YouTube, it automatically creates reports that identify trends, the best time for the most attention on YouTube, top-ranking content types in your industry, etc.
The reports can show data history of up to a year. All you need to do is to select a date range. This will show your analytics results over your selected timeline or a specific date. Here’s an example of the comparison report in action:
Keyhole also enables you to convert the generated report into PDF or XLS and download them. You can also share them externally by clicking on the share button and copying the link.
Step 3: Analyze your competitors’ top videos & follower growth
Keyhole’s functionalities are not limited to illustrative reports containing tangible and quantifiable insights. It also shows your competitor’s top-ranking videos, engagement rate, and follower growth. The platform helps you figure out the most popular post types for your brand niche and proper post frequency.
Get an edge over your competitors with Keyhole
YouTube’s popularity and wide reach can change the face of your brand marketing. But that same popularity of our favorite video streaming platform makes it just as hard for you to stand out there.
The aforementioned steps are the easiest and most rewarding way to conduct YouTube competitor analysis. The insights you gain with Keyhole’s advanced tracking features will help you chalk up a strong YouTube marketing strategy and outperform your rival brands.
With this competitive edge, you can create a following that would follow you to other social media platforms and result in tangible business outcomes.
To skip the complexities and reap the benefits of YouTube competitor analysis,
Related Articles:
How To Conduct An In-Depth YouTube Audit
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can you look at other YouTubers’ analytics?
While you can’t view someone else’s analytics on YouTube directly, you can opt for third-party tools like Keyhole to analyze your competitor’s engagement rate, follower growth, etc.
How to find competitors on YouTube?
Here's how to find competitors on YouTube:
1. Conduct a keyword research
2. Find out what other channels your subscribers watch
3. Check the videos that are recommended to your audience that are listed next to yours
What are the popular YouTube analytics tools?
Here are the popular YouTube Analytics tools:
1. Keyhole
2. Unbox Social
3. VidIQ
4. TubeBuddy
5. Vidooly
