A helpful guide to understand YouTube channel demographics

YouTube is a growing way to promote your brand and deliver fresh content to your audience. In order to effectively reach the right group of users, it’s important to discover relevant YouTube channel demographics. This analysis and information gives teams important data about themselves and their competitors to guide them in future content decisions concerning YouTube for business.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most valuable information concerning YouTube channel demographics.

Where to find important channel demographics

We will divide this section into two different areas, one to demonstrate finding demographics about your own account and one to find demographics about YouTube as an entire community. First, let’s make sure you know how to find information about your account.

First, login to YouTube. In the upper right corner of the screen will be your profile avatar, which is usually your company logo if you’re using a marketing account. Click this picture and from the dropdown menu, select ‘YouTube Studio’. This will bring up your channel dashboard.

From here, select ‘Analytics’ from the menu on the left side of the screen. This gives you a way to fully navigate different areas of importance concerning your data. Finally, click the ‘audience’ tab at the top of the screen to see your channel audience demographics. Now that you know how to locate your own analytics, let’s make sure you know how to find general YouTube demographics.

Just as important as knowing your own channel’s statistics is finding demographics of all YouTube channels. This provides valuable insight into other channels, helping you determine how they have found success and in what ways your competition is operating.

Luckily for marketers, YouTube is owned by Google, who has created a statistical website designed to show in-depth analysis of audience demographics. The project is called ‘Think Insights’ and can be found on the website ThinkwithGoogle.

To locate the YouTube research on the site, hover the ‘Advertising Channels’ dropdown and select ‘YouTube’. This will pull up numerous different pieces of information to guide you during your demographic research.

Tools to help stay on top of the latest information

Sometimes, general demographics won’t be as helpful to you as specific statistics on certain channels. This is definitely the case when you’re looking at competitor channels. Therefore, you need a tool that allows for the lookup of other channels and their success.

ThinkwithGoogle is a great website for general analysis but it lacks the potential to dive into one single channel extensively. For that, you’ll need a separate tool.

This is where a tool like Social Blade works wonders. Social Blade allows users to search for specific channels and find detailed information about them. Though this is a free service, there is a premium option to get more in-depth statistics.

One important aspect of this tool is it allows users to integrate it with their browser in some cases. This is accomplished through the Social Blade browser addon. The addon saves time and keeps users informed about specific changes to channels they’re tracking.

How to use the demographics to your advantage

There’s a reason so many teams look into YouTube demographics and other statistics – they help them create more successful campaigns. It’s easy to be misled by a flimsy use of demographics guided by intuition rather than facts. That’s why some type of structure in place to produce extensive analysis is necessary. Here’s an example of why it’s so helpful for marketing YouTube channels to study demographics.

Let’s say a team is creating YouTube videos for their audience, which they deem to be in the age range of 20-35. This number makes a lot of sense based on the demographics they’ve gathered from other sites like a homepage and social media. However, they didn’t do their due diligence, as it turns out the age range of their YouTube followers is much more wide-ranging.

As a result, their marketing campaign flops. This is a reality for a lot of teams building a YouTube channel. Too often we undergo projects based on past demographic history or even myths and intuitions. Using up-to-date tools prevents this and lets us create for our true audience.

It’s important to trust our demographics tools and continually evaluate trends and other factors involving YouTube. The success of our channel ultimately depends on how well we focus on delivering the right content to the right audience.