How to Schedule Social Media Posts Effectively
By Sabrina DorronsoroNov 27
Choosing the right analytics tool can make all the difference in your YouTube success.
When it comes to long-form videos, YouTube still leads the pack with over 2.5 billion users worldwide.
The competition among brands and creators for viewers’ attention is fiercer than ever, and relying solely on gut feeling and basic metrics isn’t enough anymore.
You need data-driven insights to grow your channel and polish your video content strategy.
And that’s where YouTube analytics tools come in. They’re great because they reveal what’s working, what isn’t, and how to sharpen your approach. This gives you a better understanding of how to create videos that hit the spot every time.
This comprehensive guide explores the 9 best YouTube analytics tools available for 2026.
From YouTube’s own built-in stats to advanced cross-platform analytics suites, each tool reviewed here offers unique ways to measure success, understand your audience, and stay ahead of the competition.
By the end of this guide, you'll find a tool that will help take your YouTube strategy to the next level.
In this guide:
1. YouTube Analytics (YouTube Studio)
The most obvious place to begin when looking at YouTube analytics tools is YouTube’s own analytics inside YouTube Studio. This built-in tool is free and provides a wealth of data about your channel’s performance.
YouTube Analytics allows you to monitor views, watch time, subscriber growth, and other key metrics for each video and for your channel as a whole.
The interface provides access to traffic sources (so you know where viewers are coming from), audience demographics (age, gender, geography), and engagement metrics like average view duration and audience retention on each video. All of this is invaluable for understanding what content resonates with your viewers.
Importantly, YouTube Analytics lets you identify your top-performing videos over different time frames and compare their performance. For example, you might discover that your tutorial videos have higher average watch times than unboxing content, which might give you an idea where to focus future efforts.
The Audience tab is especially insightful – it reveals when your viewers are typically on YouTube, what other channels they watch, and even the overlap in audience between your channel and others. These insights let you know if you’re reaching the right people and can help you optimize your content scheduling.
While third-party tools (which we’ll cover below) can extend your analytics capabilities, YouTube’s native analytics are the foundation. They give every creator a solid grasp of how their content is doing and where to improve, all within the familiar YouTube Studio environment. If you haven’t already, spend time exploring this free tool – you’ll be surprised at the actionable findings you can uncover immediately.
2. Brandwatch Social Media Management
Now that you've explored YouTube's own analytics, Brandwatch Social Media Management is a great choice to help you better understand that data.
In particular, Brandwatch’s platform stands out for its robust competitive analysis and benchmarking capabilities. Using the built-in Benchmark toolset, you can get detailed analytics on how your YouTube presence stacks up against competitors across multiple metrics.
If you manage multi-platform campaigns and you're looking to move beyond YouTube-only tools, Brandwatch’s suite is a great one-stop platform for social media analytics and more.
With cross-channel dashboards, you can measure your content’s impact across platforms in one place. For example, compare your YouTube engagement rate alongside your Instagram and TikTok stats to identify which channel yields the best ROI.
Another helpful feature is competitor analysis and tracking. With this, you can track your competitors’ YouTube channels for metrics like post frequency, subscriber growth, and engagement rates. You'll also see your rivals’ top videos and strategies at a glance, which is great for inspiring new ideas and highlighting areas where you can improve. It's like having your own competitor scorecard.
Beyond numbers, Brandwatch also incorporates social media management, social listening, and engagement tools. Monitor YouTube comments and audience conversations in a unified inbox alongside comments and messages from other platforms. This makes it easier to respond quickly and consistently, maintaining a strong brand voice everywhere.
And if you add Brandwatch Influence into the mix, you'll have access to a database of 50m+ global creators, making it easy to pinpoint the right partner for your next influencer marketing campaign. Once you've found an influencer who feels like the right fit for your brand, this Brandwatch tool makes it easy to get in touch and kick off your collaboration.
3. TubeBuddy
TubeBuddy is an ideal YouTube analytics and optimization tool for many content creators and channel managers.
It's a browser extension that integrates directly with your YouTube account, providing in-depth analytics and a host of features geared toward growing your channel.
At its core, TubeBuddy helps you audit and optimize your videos’ performance. It offers a channel health report that flags issues like missing tags or titles, and it can run channel-wide audits to identify your top and lowest-performing videos. This makes it easy to spot which content drives subscriber growth and which might need tweaking.
From an analytics perspective, TubeBuddy complements YouTube’s native stats by overlaying additional data in your browser.
For instance, when viewing a video’s page, TubeBuddy’s panel can show you SEO scores and tag rankings and even suggest opportunities (like potential high-performing tags you haven’t used). It also tracks your competitors’ YouTube channels – you can add competitor channels to see side-by-side how your subscriber and view counts are trending versus theirs.
4. VidIQ
Similar in spirit to TubeBuddy, VidIQ is another hugely popular YouTube analytics tool that helps creators make data-driven decisions.
VidIQ offers a Chrome extension and dashboard that sources detailed analytics from your YouTube channel and videos.
Upon connecting VidIQ to your YouTube channel, you’ll get a comprehensive channel audit highlighting what’s working well and what isn’t.
For example, VidIQ automatically identifies your best videos, tracks your video visibility (those bringing in the most views and subscribers recently), and flags underperforming content that might need attention. This at-a-glance audit is fantastic for busy social media managers who need to prioritize their efforts.
Another useful feature is competitor tracking. With VidIQ, you can add competitor channels and monitor their growth, recent uploads, and even the tags they use most frequently.
The tool will show you how your channel’s subscriber count and views per day compare to theirs, giving you a sense of your position in the market.
5. Sprout Social
Many social media professionals are familiar with Sprout Social as a management and analytics platform.
In Sprout’s suite, you’ll find YouTube analytics and social listening features tailored to video. Sprout Social provides a YouTube Videos Report that gives a detailed look at your videos' performance, tracking key metrics like views, likes, comments, and average watch time.
The data is presented visually so you can report to stakeholders or clients. It lets you quickly identify trends, such as which content themes get the highest engagement or how your audience retention compares across multiple videos.
As a premium platform, Sprout Social is geared toward businesses and agencies that need broad social media oversight.
6. Hootsuite
Another well-established player in social media management, Hootsuite, also supports YouTube analytics as part of its cross-channel reporting.
Hootsuite has reporting and team collaboration features, making it popular with large teams and agencies.
When it comes to YouTube, Hootsuite offers cross-channel performance reports that unify your metrics from YouTube alongside other platforms like X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.
Within its YouTube analytics, Hootsuite tracks metrics like views, subscribers gained, watch time, and engagement on your videos. It also captures data on your audience, though note that some demographic breakdowns (like detailed audience insights) may be limited by what YouTube’s API provides.
Another limitation to keep in mind is that Hootsuite’s support for newer YouTube features (like Shorts) has been known to lag behind. Its YouTube analytics may not have the ultra-specialized YouTube SEO tools of TubeBuddy or VidIQ, but it can work as part of a larger toolkit.
7. SocialPilot
For small businesses and solo marketers, SocialPilot is another favorite. It's a social media management tool that features YouTube analytics.
SocialPilot’s approach to YouTube analytics is straightforward and user-friendly. It gives you access to a single dashboard where you can quickly see how your channel grows over time and which individual videos drive that growth.
Key performance indicators like watch time and average view duration help you identify your most engaging content – for example, if one of your videos has an unusually high average view duration, that’s a clue that viewers find it very compelling.
SocialPilot also supports analytics for multiple social media platforms (Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, and others), so you can use it to manage and track your entire social presence, not just YouTube.
Within its YouTube module, one useful feature is the ability to run YouTube audience demographics reports. These reports can break down your audience by age, gender, location, and even device usage, helping you ensure your content strategy aligns with who’s actually watching.
From an analytics perspective, SocialPilot may not have the deep-dive competitive benchmarking of Brandwatch or the SEO bells and whistles of TubeBuddy, but it covers the fundamentals very well. The platform’s simplicity is actually one of its strengths; you get the data you need without a steep learning curve.
8. Quintly
If your focus is on advanced social media analytics and custom reporting (including YouTube), Quintly is a tool that should be on your radar.
This powerful social media analytics platform is best known for its customizable metrics and dashboards, and it treats YouTube as a first-class citizen in its analytics suite.
With Quintly, you can track over 100+ different YouTube KPIs, ranging from the usual (video views, subscribers, likes) to more granular metrics like average percentage viewed, engagement rate per video, or even YouTube Premium-specific view counts.
One of Quintly’s big advantages is that it allows you to pull in historical data beyond the 28-day or 90-day windows you might be limited to on native platforms. This is great for long-term performance tracking.
Customization is where Quintly truly shines. The platform provides an array of pre-built dashboard templates for social media reporting, but you can also build your own dashboards from scratch. For YouTube-specific deep dives, Quintly lets you choose exactly which metrics to monitor and how to visualize them (graphs, tables, charts).
9. Tubular Labs
Rounding out our list of YouTube analytics tools is Tubular Labs, an enterprise-grade platform specializing in video analytics across social media.
Tubular provides a macro and micro view of the online video landscape.
On the macro level, Tubular can scan the entire “video universe” across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, and more to identify trends: what genres are booming, which creators are gaining traction, and what audiences are watching most.
On the micro level, you can deep-dive into your channel’s performance with detailed metrics and comparisons.
One area where Tubular Labs stands out is influencer identification and partnership tracking. It can help you discover which YouTube creators are most influential in certain categories or regions, what brands they’re partnering with, and how effective those collaborations are.
Tubular even offers a product called Tubular Influencer Insights that evaluates how much engagement and conversion each influencer drives – extremely useful if you’re trying to justify an influencer campaign’s ROI.
From a pure analytics standpoint, Tubular has all the metrics you’d expect (views, watch time, audience demographics, etc), plus some unique ones. For example, Tubular has a measure called “Audience overlap” that shows which other social media platforms or channels your viewers frequent.
As you might have guessed, this is a hefty platform that typically requires a committed budget (enterprise-level pricing is not publicly disclosed). It might be overkill for individual creators or small businesses.
Final thoughts on YouTube analytics tools
Choosing the right YouTube analytics tool (or combination of tools) is a great way to optimize your video content strategy.
The platforms we’ve reviewed – from YouTube’s own analytics to advanced suites like Brandwatch, Tubular Labs, and Quintly – each serve different needs.
A solo content creator might choose completely different YouTube analytics tools for a mid-size company's marketing team because their needs are different. Enterprises and data-driven organizations often gravitate toward high-end solutions like Brandwatch Social Media Management to get that competitive edge and a unified view of their social performance.
No matter your size or strategy, the key is to harness the data. Regularly reviewing your analytics lets you learn exactly what your audience wants – and deliver more of it.
Perhaps you’ll discover your viewers crave longer, in-depth videos or that your how-to tutorials outshine your product promos in engagement. Maybe competitor analysis will reveal a content gap you can fill.
With these insights, you can refine everything from your content calendar to your video SEO, ultimately driving more views, engagement, and growth for your channel.
As you seek out the best YouTube analytics tools for your needs, remember that many offer a product demo or free versions, so you can always test a few and see which interface and features you prefer.
Finally, if you’re looking for a unified solution to manage and analyze not just YouTube but all your social channels, Brandwatch Social Media Management can bring social analytics under one roof and help turn insights into action.