YouTube has incredible potential for SaaS brands, with a scope of leveraging it for better reach and engagement. Videos, in general, play a major role in making a purchase decision. This may be why 83% of people acknowledge that a demo video helps them decide to purchase. It has the force that drives brand awareness, engagement, and customer retention.
But what is the point of creating such videos if you don’t leverage the analytics by tracking them? Leveraging YouTube means using the data available to improve your SaaS customer retention and acquisition strategies.
By analytics, we don’t mean vanity metrics but tracking numbers that show how your channel’s videos perform and how significantly they contribute to your brand.
These numbers tell the story of what keeps your customer base happy and engaged.
Tracking for brand monitoring and customer retention
Brand monitoring and customer retention serve two different purposes.
Monitoring your SaaS brand requires tracking numbers that showcase the brand’s growth over time.
Similarly, retention metrics will track how existing customers use the videos to learn more about the product.
Let’s break this down.
Brand Monitoring: These metrics will show how well your videos resonate with your target audience. Are people finding, watching, and interacting with your content? The right metrics will give you those answers.
Customer Retention: Think of your YouTube channel as an extension of your SaaS customer support. With how-to videos and product guides, you give customers a powerful self-service resource. These metrics will help gauge whether the videos are effective or whether people understand and apply the knowledge you share.
Let us now explore these metrics separately for brand monitoring and customer retention.
Brand monitoring metrics to track
YouTube has evolved into much more than a video-sharing hub. Think of it as an extension of the search engine and social media platform that provides a potential hotbed for brand conversations.
With brand monitoring metrics, you offer a window into how your SaaS company is perceived and discussed within the YouTube landscape. This goes beyond monitoring metrics like views and subscribers since you’d delve into how your content resonates with your audience.
How do you make the most of these metrics?
Track trends over time: These metrics won’t add much value if you look into these in isolation. Instead, consider monitoring patterns and changes over longer periods to comprehensively view your brand’s growth trajectory on YouTube.
Use Tools: YouTube’s built-in analytics provide a wealth of data. Consider supplementing this with social listening tools and third-party analytics platforms for even more in-depth analysis (especially for tracking mentions outside your channel).
Consider using Keyhole, Brand24, Hootsuite, Talkwalker, etc., for social listening. There are a range of third-party YouTube analytics platforms like TubeBuddy, VidiQ, and SocialBlad to gain in-depth analysis.
Here’s what you need to keep an eye on:
#1. Views
The total number of times your videos have been watched
This is the first layer of understanding your content’s reach and visibility. For SaaS brands, a high view count signifies their reach regarding whether they have a broad audience and whether there is any potential for higher lead generation.
The real game of this metric is to go deeper to correlate views with other engagement metrics to gauge the quality of reach. A video with a high view count but low engagement might indicate that while the content attracts attention, it may only partially resonate with your target audience.
#2. Watch time
The cumulative time people spend watching your videos
For SaaS brands, high watch time on product demos, webinars, etc., signals that viewers find your content helpful and are willing to invest their time. This metric directly influences YouTube’s recommendation algorithms.
#3. Subscribers
The number of people who subscribe to your channel for updates
This metric suggests how high the probability of increasing leads is. Monitoring this metric allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your content strategy in building a loyal community, which is crucial for long-term success and even customer retention.
#4. Likes, Dislikes, and Comments
Direct social feedback on your videos
Analyzing these metrics provides insights into your YouTube video, which is helpful to know customer satisfaction and content preferences.
Positive engagement can highlight strengths and areas of resonance, while dislikes and critical comments offer opportunities for improvement and dialogue.
#5. Shares
Tracking ‘shares’ allows us to gauge how often viewers share your videos with their social circle.
It is a powerful metric that acts as organic social proof, demonstrating virality and audience advocacy. Higher shares indicate greater perceived credibility. Social proof marketing uses what loyal customers feel about a product, encouraging them to share it and convince new customers to try it.
This metric also helps analyze where your content is shared and how you can customize your marketing strategies for those platforms and communities.
#6. Traffic Sources
Understanding viewer pathways
Use this metric to know where your audience is—direct searches, suggested content, or external sites. As a SaaS brand, you can use this metric to optimize content strategies across platforms, which helps ensure that every piece of content is not just seen but seen by the right eye.
Analyzing traffic sources allows for targeted content optimization, enhancing reach to potential customers actively searching for SaaS solutions.
#7. Impressions
Measuring the number of times your video thumbnails are viewed on YouTube
High impressions of your SaaS videos showcase effective keyword usage and a strong presence in your niche. However, impressions alone don’t guarantee views, but they can suggest whether your visual and textual cues are in sync with what your target audience seeks.
So, you can refine titles and thumbnails based on this metric, which can affect your content’s performance.
#8. Impressions Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Measures content appeal by revealing how compelling your video thumbnails and titles
A high CTR represents capturing attention and then converting curiosity (represented through impressions) into action.
SaaS companies that create videos around product knowledge can use this metric to understand whether the language and imagery resonate with your target audience.
Customer retention ensuring continued success
As a SaaS brand, you must consider YouTube beyond acquisition and brand awareness portals. This is also a powerful tool for customer retention as you publish different videos engaging existing users. Think of putting up how-to videos, product guides, and feature updates that help users get the most out of your product, which reduces churn and promotes loyalty.
So, YouTube metrics for Saas customer retention can become a powerful support channel. It can directly influence how customers adopt and continue to find value in your SaaS product. Tracking the right metrics helps understand how well your video content keeps customers engaged, which contributes to reducing churn.
Key metrics to consider here:
#9. Watch Time on Tutorial Videos
Measure the engagement level of customers
High watch time on tutorial videos indicates that customers find your content valuable. SaaS brands can use this metric to identify what educational content brings to their user base.
Customers can adopt your products better by watching your tutorial videos as they understand and leverage your product more effectively. Analyzing watch time will allow you to focus on areas of high interest and importance.
#10. Drop-off points in videos
Identifying content and product frictions
Understanding where viewers stop watching your YouTube video. It can help uncover significant insights into the content’s effectiveness and potential issues with the product itself.
Drop-off points indicate areas where your explanation may need to be clearer, more complex, or more engaging. As a SaaS brand, you can get this crucial insight to refine video content to resolve product usage bottlenecks.
#11. Traffic sources for support videos
Optimizing content discovery to enhance better reach
Analyze how customers find your support videos. It can be through search engines, direct links from your website, emailers, or other channels.
Here, if a chunk of the video traffic comes from search, it underscores the importance of SEO and the need to align video titles and descriptions with common customer queries. Redirected traffic through direct links or your support portal highlights the effectiveness of your in-product guidance and resource integration.
#12. CTA Click-through Rate
Measure actionable engagement
Directly measure how effectively your content motivates viewers to take the next step. A high click-through rate from these CTAs indicates that your content is informative and compelling enough to drive action.
For Saa brands, this means identifying the effectiveness of your content in retaining customers and encouraging deeper engagement with your product.
#13. Repeat viewership
Know the learning needs of customers
Repeated viewership of specific videos means the customer needs to fully understand the product usage. It signifies that they couldn’t fully grasp it on the first viewing or that the video is so valuable as a reference that customers return to it multiple times.
Track repeat viewership for your SaaS product to understand areas where customers may need more support. This will then provide input to the content team, focusing on creating videos to address complex topics in detail.
#14. Search terms
Identify customer pain points for SEO purposes
This is a powerful metric showing keywords and phrases customers use to find your SaaS product videos. Label your video content with relevant titles, descriptions, and meta tags to keep them in line with customers’ pressing needs and challenges.
Analyzing these search terms reveals common issues with customers and knowing the language they use to describe their problems. For instance, are they asking ‘how to’ queries more or ‘how can I’? Questions? This way, you can align your SEO strategies around discoverable and precisely targeted keywords to meet customer needs.
#15. Customer feedback
Gain more insights on how your content connects
Add CTAs to videos, encouraging viewers to rate or leave comments to collect direct feedback. A step further would be to blend in polls or surveys directly within videos to gain more qualitative insights. This will provide data on customer satisfaction, content clarity, and the overall effectiveness of your support materials.
For SaaS brands, such a feedback loop paves the way for iterative content improvement, giving a clear direction for refining content strategies. It ensures that support videos address customer issues and do so in a way that is engaging, helpful, and aligned with customer expectations.
How to use Keyhole’s YouTube analytics?
Keyhole’s YouTube analytics help track conversations and hashtags on YouTube to understand how the audience reacts to your videos. This means you now get a comprehensive view of the audience’s sentiments about your videos that help improve your YouTube channel performance.
With this tool at your disposal, you can unlock the following:
Measure metrics that matter the most: Leverage YouTube keyword analytics to track conversion based on the tags and hashtags you use. This helps identify how your YouTube efforts translate into real results — driving traffic to your website or boosting sales.
Fine-tune video content strategy: Sentiment analysis provides valuable feedback on how viewers react to your videos. Leverage this data to create videos that resonate with your audience and keep them returning for more.
Track and engage your target audience: Keyhole’s YouTube hashtag analytics is designed specifically for video tags. It helps discover the perfect keywords to attract and keep your ideal viewers engaged.
Outsmart your competitors: Keyhole tracks the performance of your competitors’ YouTube channels to identify areas where you can improve your own channel.
Conclusion
If you are not using YouTube analytics for SaaS videos, it’s time to start doing it. Whether you’re in the midst of starting a new software company, or have grown a software company for years, video can be a huge growth hack when done properly.
Think of YouTube videos as an extension of customer engagement practices to positively impact your brand’s image.
Now is the time to start experimenting, evaluating the data, and then relentlessly tweaking your YouTube strategy to align with the behaviors and needs of your audience.
Use a powerful platform like YouTube for both – branding and retaining customers. And acing on both these aspects requires digging deeper into the aforementioned YouTube metrics.
Want to get more out of your YouTube Data? Book a demo and experience the difference
Author Bio
Carl Torrence is a Content Marketer at Marketing Digest. His core expertise lies in developing data-driven content for brands, SaaS businesses, and agencies. In his free time, he enjoys binge-watching time-travel movies and listening to Linkin Park and Coldplay albums.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. How often should I track my YouTube metrics?
The tracking frequency depends on your end goals and how active your channel is. Established channels prefer checking in on metrics at least once a month to identify trends and see how your content is performing. This weekly monitoring helps adjust strategies quickly if you're actively growing your channel.
2. Why is the audience retention rate important for SaaS brands on YouTube?
The audience retention rate gauges whether the videos keep viewers engaged over their duration. SaaS brands needing high retention rates require their content to capture and maintain the audience's interest. This is necessary to educate viewers about the brand's offerings and nurture a loyal customer base.
3. Besides the listed metrics, what other data should I consider for customer retention?
Apart from the above fifteen metrics we discuss, pay consistent attention to —
-Comments: See whether customers are finding your videos, getting support, or expressing frustration. The sentiment and themes within comments can be a goldmine.
-Community tab: Check if you have the community fracture to observe audience interactions. This will reveal how customers engage with you and each other.
-Integration with your CRM: If possible, tie YouTube viewership data to your customer relationship management system. This helps understand whether viewers convert into customers or long-time customers watch your educational content.
4. How can SaaS brands use YouTube analytics to improve customer support and satisfaction?
YouTube analytics provide insights into viewer behavior and preferences. This contributes to tailoring video content strategy to better meet customer needs. Analyze comments, likes, and engagement patterns to identify common questions or issues. Accordingly, craft targeted videos to address these, improving overall customer support and satisfaction.
