In March 2020 I switched exclusively to VidIQ for keyword research, productivity and optimization help.
Over the the following 12 months I grew my channel from 11K subscribers to 30K subscribers… I think that shows how powerful VidIQ as a tool can be.
Best of all you can install VidIQ for FREE and use most of the tools I used to get that growth.
Here are 4 MUST USE tools from VidIQ that many people sleep on…
Channel Audit (left hand navigation) – This makes use of your channels behavior metrics and engagement to automate a report for you. This is great for the smaller youtubers and helps educate new youtubers about their own channel audience. This will look into your stats and help you identify your best performing content, plan strategy around your content creation as well as comparing you to your manually added competitors and competition based your channel niche
This helps teach a newer YouTuber what they need to look for to double down on when trying to grow their brand or channel, as well as warning you what you may need to avoid. It also offers overall channel metrics for best practices on title size, description links, end screen and info cards.
Yes this maybe taking youtube analytics data and making it look more human and could be done by a youtube veteran with analytics groups and painstakingly scraping through stats – but I feel for the new youtuber this does a lot of the heavy lifting for them and makes analytics less daunting.
Competitors (on channel pages and left hand navigation – This can be used to track what your desired niche is talking about. You can add up to 20 channels while on the Boost tier and this allows you to see emerging trends within recent content published by “competitors” in your niche.
This I find is more impactful than the trend alerts as you can see the recent published content yourself and catch any new topics before they are large enough to pop a trend alert.
For example – If I have 20 people in the YouTube Educator space in my competitors list and I set it to what they published this week and either views or VPH (views per hour), I can then scroll down and make a mental note of topics. If the niche community as a whole are talking about a new rule change (age restriction), new feature (youtube shorts), a new camera, or a new tool (adobe premiere pro auto resize videos) then you would then see the start of a topic bubble you might want to add your own opinion into.
You can also catch hot videos over the last X period based on this VPH – see if there is a new breakout video, or topic that has velocity or growing velocity that you might want to take advantage of.
Thumbnail Preview (upload page and video detail page right side – Click Through Rate is key but so is getting people to stop to see your thumbnail and stop scrolling first.
This tool allows you to search a keyword you want to rank for and see how that thumbnail matches up to its rival video thumbnails in the search results. This way you can compare, tweak and research your competition.
I have used this a lot from Feb 2020 to Feb 2021 this year and it has increased my overall channel CTR from 8% to 12%.
This way if you upload a thumbnail, search for a term and see all the thumbnails are blue… maybe you want to lean more red, or yellow, larger text or more visual storytelling etc so you do not blend in with the masses and help with the STOP SCROLLING & CLICK.
Channel Trending (channel home page) – This is great for rival/niche successful video research. Go to a channel, click the trending link under there channel banner on the right hand side. In here you will see that specific channels best performing videos based on VPH. This is an insight into that channels power topics (or proven winners) and something you might want to touch upon if you are in their niche.
Now, I do not suggest you use this tool just to steal videos but more of part of a research tool to validate your wish to make a video on set topics. So for example when searching on google for a blog topic you would look at the top 5 articles to see what their article is like. You learn what is expected to be in that article, what you can add/improve on – same for using this as a video research tool.
With some well placed research you can use this to win traffic or even misplace videos that may get great traffic but are a little old or out of date. YouTube loves fresh(er) content over old.
Get started to with VidIQ today for FREE! – VidIQ is free to install and has a huge range of tools without spending a buck!