YouTube Analytics, Explained
If you’re interested in video content, there’s no better platform than YouTube. For both individual creators and brand channels, video is a powerful way to connect with your audience and build a loyal fanbase.
As with all social media platforms, understanding your analytics will help you perfect your YouTube video strategy so that you can create resonant content and grow your following.
Here are the key stats you should understand when looking at your YouTube analytics:
Channel Analytics To Watch
To access your channel analytics, open up your account’s YouTube Studio page and click the graph icon on the left hand side. You can customize the time period, but the default shows analytics for the past 28 days.
Channel Views: How many overall views your channel received across all videos (note: a “view” on YouTube means someone has watched at least 30 seconds of a video) in a given time period. This is a good overview of how many viewers your channel is currently receiving in a month.
Subscriber Growth: This statistic shows you the positive or negative change in subscribers over a given time period. A large increase in subscribers indicates that your channel is growing in popularity, always a positive sign!
Top Videos: This one is pretty straightforward, as you will see your top 10 best performing videos over the time period you are viewing.
Take a look at your top videos and look for any trends or points of similarity between them. Is there a common theme or format that is performing the best? Identifying these commonalities will help you determine what viewers are best responding to so you can shape your future content strategy to share similar content.
Impressions: The number of times your videos’ thumbnails appear across YouTube, as well as external websites and apps that link to YouTube videos.
Impression Click-Through Rate: This is the percentage of users who click through to watch one of your videos from an impression. According to YouTube, average impression click-through rates range from 2% to 10%.
YouTube also recommends waiting at least a week to get a video’s true click-through rate and compare against older videos to get an accurate comparison of your average click-through rate.
Unique Viewers: Because a single viewer can watch and rewatch videos over and over again, or watch several videos on your channel in a row, it’s also important to see how many unique viewers are tuning into your channel.
Traffic Source Types
YouTube breaks down traffic sources into several categories, including YouTube search, Channel pages, Suggested videos, Playlists, and External. This overview will show you the percentage breakdown of each type of traffic source, and below, you’ll be able to see more detailed analytics on each traffic type.
External: traffic sources from outside of YouTube. This can include Google searches, your website, other social media channels, and external websites that your videos may be embedded on.
Playlists: You can create different playlists on your channel to group similar videos or entries in a series together and organize your content. Other users can also add your videos to playlists of their own. This section will show you the best-performing playlists, which can help you see the types of content that people are looking at the most, and also channels that are similar to yours that are helping to boost your content.
Suggested Videos: one of the reasons why YouTube can become such a time-suck is their algorithm that suggests related videos once you are finished watching your current video. You can see the videos that direct viewers to your content and understand the topics and styles of videos your viewers are interested in based on the videos that led them to you.
YouTube Search: These are the top search terms that lead viewers to discover your videos. This is why it is super important to optimize your video titles and descriptions with searchable terms. The best titles succinctly explain what the video is about and utilize trending buzzwords when applicable.
Video Analytics To Watch
Along with channel analytics, you can view statistics on individual videos to further understand how your audience engages with your content and if certain videos are successful or not. As with Channel Analytics, you can change the time period for video analytics, but the default provides analytics since the video was published.
Views: How many total views a video has received. This is a great top line measure of success, but be sure to look at the other numbers for a complete picture of a video’s success, as YouTube counts just 30 seconds of watch time as 1 view.
Subscribers: How many new subscribers you gained from a video. If this number is high, that’s a great sign, as it means your video was engaging and valuable in content, so much so that users have subscribed to see more of your content!
Audience Retention: How much of your video are viewers actually watching? Viewers click on videos that aren’t what they're looking for, or get bored and click away, all the time, so this graphs out the average drop off of viewership over the length of your video. There will almost always be drop off, but the higher percentage you keep throughout the video, the more your video is doing a good job at retaining an audience.
Top Traffic Sources: How people found your video. As with channel analytics, this is broken down into different categories like YouTube Search, Suggested Videos, Playlists, and more, but the analytics here refer to the specific video you are monitoring. In addition, you can also see how many of your subscribers received a “New Video” notification and clicked through to watch (according to YouTube, the average notification click-through rate is between 0.5% and 2.5%).
With video content more popular than ever, understanding how your YouTube videos perform will enable you to create effective and strong-performing content. Knowing the key analytics to track will also help you when working with YouTube influencers so you can set goals for your partnership. Need help finding the right YouTube creators? We can help!
Want to learn more about analytics on other social media platforms? Discover our guides to Instagram Insights and Instagram Story Insights.