How to Use Google and YouTube’s Find My Audience Tool
What is Find My Audience?
YouTube is a big place.
The latest figures state there are currently 31 million channels on the video-sharing platform, with that number being a 25 percent increase from the year before.
Not only that, but people are creating content just as rapidly as these new channels are being born with 500 hours of video being uploaded every minute.
As an audience viewer it can be difficult to navigate your way through the millions of hours of content available to find true quality content you want to watch.
On the flip side, as a business, filmmaker, vlogger, documentarist, or anyone else uploading their content onto YouTube, getting your material solid view counts which can be turned into tangible sales figures might seem like a daunting prospect, with an understandable fear of that YouTube campaign being lost within the mountains of uploads crowding you out on all sides.
Fortunately there is help at hand, a guide, if you will, to help audiences and channels find each other across the wide expanse of cyberspace.
From Google, Find My Audience is just as much about getting your audience and customers find you as it is you finding them.
Why Use Find My Audience?
At its core, Find My Audience allows you to figure out who your most valuable customers are on youTube, looking at the type of content they might typically watch and the channels within your specified area they loyally subscribe to.
This gives you a great base-mark and launch platform from which to begin designing your campaign. It’s about discovering your audience
You might think you know your target demographic’s key interests, their purchasing habits or their general product wish-list - and to a large extent that will probably be accurate, especially from an offline perspective within the traditional data set of what you’re used to.
However, YouTube opens your commercial world up to a far wider client base, who might have a more sophisticated or just different consumer traits then you initially thought.
With that in mind, being able to access the consumer data generated by users and collated by Google is an invaluable tool to have at your disposal.
What’s more, Find My Audience builds an audience profile tailored to your business/campaign specifications, and explains its findings in a no-nonsense, jargon-less way, meaning you and your campaign team spend less time trying to identify the salient points from the report you get, and more time building a winning, effective initiative. So, how does it work?
How Does Find My Audience Work?
You begin by choosing either YouTube’s “in-market” or “affinity” audiences:
In-market audience: people actively researching or planning to purchase products/services like yours
Affinity audience: those whose habits and pastimes relate to what your business is offering.
The next step is to select a general audience. This includes (amongst others):
Food and Dining
Home and Garden
Lifestyle and Hobbies
Technology
Travel
Having made your selection, you will then be given more specific audiences. So within the realm of “Food and Dining” for example, you will see:
Coffee Shop Regulars
Cooking Enthusiasts
Fast Food Cravers
Foodies
Frequently Dines Out
From here you can learn more about each individual category, with nuanced insights on each. You then build your custom audience profile, adding these distinct audiences (you can add up to five specific ones).
After you’ve added the five specific categories you want, Find My Audience is then ready to generate your “Audience Profile”.
What’s In My Audience Profile?
Your audience profile is made of three constituent parts:
Audience Overview
Here you will learn how to interpret your audience insights
Audience Insights
Next, discover the lifestyle attributes of your selected audiences and their consumer patterns
Taking Action
Finally, use these insights to start building a steadfast YouTube audience strategy
Essentially the header page, the Audience Overview breaks down the Audience Insight summary. So if you have “Cooking Enthusiasts” as one of your audience demographics, the Audience Overview explains the five sub-headings within the summary, which are as follows:
Audience Description and Summary.
A high-level overview of your chosen audience
YouTube Channels Cooking Enthusiasts [or other] are likely to be watching.
Allows you to explore other YouTube channels your audience watches to garner a better understanding of what content resonates best with them.
Cooking Enthusiasts [or other] are researching or planning to purchase which products and services? Understanding what your audience is planning to buy elsewhere can help identify other relevant audiences with similar behaviours and product wish-lists.
Cooking Enthusiasts [or other] are also likely to be part of these audiences.
Recognizing the hobbies and habits of your audience can play a part in helping see what new audiences can be included as part of your strategy going forward.
Explore subcategories within Cooking Enthusiasts [or other].
Create even further personalized campaigns by discovering the “niche subcategories” of your selected audience. So for Cooking Enthusiasts, this might be “Aspiring Chefs” for example.
Following on from the Audience Overview, Your Audience Insight is just over a page, and breaks down clearly and concisely the above findings particular to each audience. It’s important to go over this carefully, and you’ll find even more value form the process by evaluating and analyzing your current audience strategy against any insights you take from this section of the report.
The final part of the report is where your Audience Profile all comes together:
Taking Action. This comes in three parts:
Applying the above insights into your audience strategy
Inspiring your creative strategy
Selecting your audience types which in turn informs your recommended content format to align with the ultimate business goal
There’s a lot in this final phase, but it can be summed up best by going beyond the typical understanding of your target audience.
People who are into food aren’t just into food. They might also be in to health and fitness. There’s a strong chance that lifestyle enthusiasts have a passion for travel also.
Final Thoughts
It may take some getting used to, but Find My Audience is an invaluable tool.
By combining the insights you discover from Find My Audience you are in a great position to create content that speaks to your target audience in their totality, allowing them to relate and respond to a business that understands them better than anyone else.
