Social Media and Youtube Analytics | June 2023
- Jordan & Emily
- Jul 3, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 4, 2023
Hi Guys! Welcome to this brand new page! Whether your creating online content with a dream to live nomadically like us or you're just curious what a social media growth journey looks like, you're in the right place. This page has a lot of words, numbers and graphs so I hope I can make it as entertaining as possible while still providing the juicy stats you want. This page might use acronyms, if you're unsure of what they are i'll include a definition glossary at the end. Jump to what you want:
Youtube Analytics
June was as interesting of a month as we've ever had on Youtube. We had expected a significant income fall off from May as we were moving into South America which has a lower CPM. What we didn't account for is that the videos we released through Canada and America would have a very steady view stream and rather than our South America content commanding a local audience, the North American audience seems to have stuck around!
Best performing Video (June)
Our Rocky Mountaineer video which we still use as our channel trailer has continued to bring in views and subscribers through June and it seems that those viewers also had interest in our other videos like New York and Washington!
Underperforming video (June)
Our worst performing video for the month were our first 2 to be released in South america. Both our 'Bogota first impressions' and this 'Colombia food tour' It was a little bit dissapointing as usually food tours tend to start things off for the local viewers of a country. Nevertheless it's techinically only been on the platform for 18 days and if Youtube has taught us anything, a video can pick up views at ANY point!
Strategy change
After joining a like minded group of people also making YouTube content, we decided that for the month of June we would have a little bit of a stratergy change with our channel and re-introduced high quality shorts when we could. These are shorts that we have put extra effort into or that have performed well accross any of our other platforms. Having these repurposed short form content means the number of content pieces we posted in June is pretty different than usual.
We make sure to untick the 'Publish to subscribers' option when posting shorts so we don't annoy the long form chronological viewers. So this means that we have gained 45 Subscribers just from our shorts in June and if we can get even a few of those converted into long form viewers by having YouTube showing them our long form thumbnails, then it's definitely worth it!
There is one unfortunate downside to shorts though. If we have an automtic ending card on our long form content like 'Best for viewer' - Youtube seems to always think the best video for the viewer is a short. Meaning we are moving viewers from long form to short form and wasting an impression spot at the end of every video. We can go in and manually change those recommended videos and we have been, but hopefully youtube eventually comes out with an option to 'best for view long form only' or something. that would be the best!
Financial Statistics (June)
Not only did we have our highest income month in our YouTube history for June but we also had our Highest individual day of $52.31. To but that into perspective, thats over 50% of our daily budget. If that's something we can repeat we would have effectively DOUBLED the length of this adventure. It's still a far cry from our sustainability goal but it's a bloody good dent!
Website Analytics
We've had a website for about a year now but havent really been using it properly. we've made a few blog posts and published these reports here but other than that it was kind of deserted. Recently, we've put more effort into the site by trying to figure out SEO and Site speed as well as changing the design and adding more posts. We also added our first google ads on the pages (sorry) which has contributed a small trickle to our income. Let me break down what we've learnt:
Website design change
First thing we did when we realised we were making a bit of money from the site (Even if it is usually only 1c a day!) was to try and optimise it! We deleted the auto-video play that used to happen at the header of the website and tried to optimise all of the images used by both manually compressing them AND running them through a JPEG compressor online. We also added a 'call to action' in the form of a 'Follow our adventures' button in the hopes that that link will mean the website will act as a funnel for our YouTube.
Website search engine optimisation (SEO)
We've also dived pretty deeply into trying to SEO our website, which has a lot of factors (A lot more than I thought) but one of the biggest things is Key Words. Our website builder Wix has an SEO assistant tool that makes it pretty clear what needs to be done. Effectively the title needs to represent the key word, so does the body of the text and the meta description. All of which can be edited using the assistant which makes life so much easier!
Website page Indexing
The third and arguably biggest thing we did was make sure our blog post pages can actually be found on google. Effectively you can create the best page ever but if google doesnt add it to it's massive catalog, it won't be found. They call this 'Indexing' and when we first found this to check we realised only 5 of our pages were actualled 'indexed' meaning only 5 pages were discoverable on Google! Crazy. We figured out how to go into the google console and request google to index individual pages this can take anywhere from 2 days to a number of weeks. This also doesn't mean google WILL add it to the index but it at least attempts it. In June we grew from 5 pages indexed to 59! I have a sneaking suspicion that making sure your pages are indexed are 40% of the SEO job people do for you if you pay them for SEO on a website like fiver!
Website page load speed
The fourth thing we did was actually start measuring our site speed and performance. Google doesn't like to show slow pages in top search results so we did what we could. We compressed images, deleted widgets and auto-plays and deleted entire pages that werent necessary! we have 3 high scores but an overal performance on Mobile really low (Still trying to figure that out) But our Desktop score when we first checked was FILLED with red and numbered in the 30's. Also these scores change all the time (Our desktop performance rating fluctuates between 70 and 90) so we take each rating with a grain of salt.
Instagram Analytics
The world of instagram is another place we havent really explored too much. we've made a few reels and posts that have done okay but we never really had a clear vision or any consisteny until recently.
In June our instagram reached 8035 accounts despite having less than 1000 followers!
Our followers grew from 724 at the beggining of May to 844 at the beginning of June, thats a growth of 120 followers but where it sounds much more impressive is a month on month growth rate of 14%
We also decided to switch up our Bio to send a clear message of who we are and what our offer is as well as create another pretty obvious funnel to our Youtube because that's ultimately where we want everyone to go!
While our feed is definitely not an aesthetic one like a lot of those big creators are i think we've kind of found a bit of consistency in our content calendar.
We mostly post a comboination of these three things:
- Static posts (Generally information or 10 photos from our last month or last destination)
- Reels (what we spent in a city, country, month or overall)
- Stories (Almost up to date real time updates)
TikTok Analytics
'Throw anything and everything at the wall and see what sticks' is the method we subscribe to for TikTok. It seems to have no real rhyme or reason so we are repurposing as much as we can, not really keeping any schedule and posting all over the place!
We grew on Tiktok from 6990 at the end of May all the way up to 7045 but then the last 2 weeks of June our followers started going down. Honestly, no rhyme or reason to tiktok!
We have updated our bio to make it more clear about who we are and also try and create a bit of a funnel to out YouTube. If we are having 1000 people a month viewing our profile we need to make it as clear as possible that our long form content is where we really live and it's just a click away!
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Youtube Shorts Analytics
There is a big debate about whether you should have your shorts and long form content on the same channel and the answer is still kind of unknown. We've seen people succeed with them together and we've seen others have no real positive impact. The theory goes: Shorts subsribers may not watch long form content, so Youtube could be wasting an impression on a shorts subscriber and therefore negatively impacting CTR. We're still not sure about it all so we are posting shorts we deem of high quality on our main channel while still repurposing older content or lower quality short form content on our shorts channel called 'Jordan and Emily shorts' These are Non chronological travel snack packs aaaaand that's exactly what we post. We are still scheduled for a post per day until July 6ths to see if consistency alone can get the job done but i'd imagine without big effort it's hard to expect big results.
The shorts channel has the most random spikes. These three videos all performed well and one went absolutely bananas and got 151,000 plays! what's even more interesting is it's individual analytics!
It took 45 days for it to just randomly explode, without any rhymeor reason. We actually hadnt even opened our shorts channel in months and when we checked back we had 400 subs and this litle beauty. So confusing!
Facebook Analytics
Big shout out to SimsONthego for this. We never really considered using facebook but after we were told by Sam and Nick about how they have success with it, we wanted to give it a try!
We grew from 30 followers (That we didn't even know we had) up to 36 by repurposing some content we thought might do well on Facebook. While we will continue to post on Facebook periodically we don't look at it as a main source of exposure or a main funnel for our YouTube channel.
Summary
The month of June was full of hard work and lots of little tweeks accross multiple platforms. It's super nice to see it be rewarded with our best Youtube income month ever.. Even if a lot of the effort was techinically accross different platforms haha. If you want to see more detail about our income from these platforms as well as everything we've spent head over to our Income and Expense report for June. This took be about 4 hours to put together so i hope you had some enjoyment or satisfied some of your curiousity by reading it! Thanks for reading our social Media and Youtube Analytics report!
Glossary of terms
CPM - 'Cost per Mille' This is the cost an advertiser will pay YouTube per 1000 views. It fluctuates through a number of factors, the biggest two being location the ad is viewed from and type of ad. E.G. Finance videos get finance ads that are more expensive. A viewer from a wealthier country is more expensive than less wealthier countries.
RPM - 'Revenue per mille' Is the amount of money you will take home as Adsense after Youtube has taken it's cut from the CPM.
AVD - 'Average view duration' The average time spent viewing your video generally represented as a %
CTR - 'Click through rate' This is a % of people who click on your thumbnail when shown Impression - Amount of times your thumbnail has been shown to a potential audience
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