Hey, it's Matt here at YouTube Space New York.
You ever wonder how YouTube decides what videos to recommend?
Well, now you can see some of that in the new YouTube Studio Analytics.
We call it "the funnel"
and in this video, I'm going to sit down and walk you through it with our own videos.
Alright, are we ready to roll?
Cool.
I've pulled up the new YouTube Studio Analytics for our channel
and what I'd like you to do is open up your own Analytics for your channel
and follow along with me.
If you need to pause me at any time or go back, feel free.
OK, so I'm going to pull up one of our videos.
It's about merch.
Here it is.
"Show Off Your Merch with the YouTube Merchandise Shelf"
and the reason I picked this one is because it didn't do that well.
Now, let me come over here to Analytics
and you'll see what I mean.
Here's the blue line
here's the performance of this video in its life
compared to how we normally do with our uploads.
Now, the first thing I want to do here is
try to get to the first seven days of this video's life
because that's when most of the action happens on a video.
And you see here that it says March 19.
That was the publish date
that was the date it went public to the audience.
So, we're going to go down here to "Custom"
we're going to pick March 19th
and then seven days later, which would be the 25th.
You can see here, seven days selected, hit apply.
Now, here we are, here's the first seven days of this video's life.
Now, click over here to "Reach viewers"
and you'll see that we have "Impressions, Impressions click-through rate
"Views," and "Unique viewers."
If we scroll down, here on the right we have what we call "the funnel."
The cool thing about this funnel
is it's showing you the path that users took in engaging with your video
and it helps YouTube understand
how well your video is attracting and retaining viewers.
Now, "Impressions" are how many times your video thumbnails
were shown to viewers on the YouTube platform.
So, as I scroll through YouTube videos on my phone
every time a thumbnail is surfaced to me
that is counted as one impression for that video.
Think of each impression as your potential reach on YouTube
and a chance to earn a new view.
Impressions will always be the biggest number in the funnel.
Some people will scroll right past your thumbnail
and not watch the video
but others will click on it and watch.
Those people take us further down the funnel to "Views from impressions."
So, as you can see here, we went from 235K impressions
down to only 6.4K views
which is, when you do the math, a 2.7% click-through rate.
That's not great, for our channel.
So, what does that tell me?
Well, one: It suggests that maybe the thumbnail and title weren't as compelling.
After all, usually people see a thumbnail first
and if that's interesting, they then read the title of the video
and if that still has their attention
they click on the video and hopefully watch a lot of it.
Clearly, most people skipped right past this video
and decided, maybe, to watch something else.
So, maybe I should consider re-thinking my titles and thumbnails
for this particular series.
And, if you continue down the funnel, we get to a 42-second average view duration
which is quite low, for our channel.
This all leads to 4.5K minutes of watch time.
That's the bottom of the funnel.
You can really dig in to this average view duration.
Is this higher or lower than normal?
This is lower for us, so why might that be?
The first thing I would think about with this merch video is
maybe some, or most, creators on our channel don't even sell merch.
Maybe that's why they weren't interested.
But also, maybe the content itself wasn't very compelling
maybe the introduction was way too long
and we didn't get to the meat of the video, the value of the video, until too late.
So, that video didn't do too well for us, but let's take a look at a video that did.
If I go back to the channel level and look at our "Overview" tab
and scroll down here to "Top videos" again
I can see that our video on Ryan ToysReview
has done really well.
So, let's click into that.
OK, I went ahead and set this to the first seven days
because we want a clean comparison.
And I'm going to come over here to "Reach viewers"
and once again, I'm going to scroll down to the funnel for this video.
OK, based on 541K impressions
this video generated almost 75K views
from those impressions
which comes out to nearly a 14% click-through rate
and that's really high for our channel.
Those folks watched for a 1:58 average view duration
generating 148K watch time minutes.
So, this high click-through rate and amount of minutes watched
suggest that this video gets clicked on and enjoyed a lot
so YouTube has been surfacing it more than our other videos.
And you can see that here, 56.8% from YouTube recommending your content
meaning this specific video.
Of course, you can do this with any of your own uploaded videos
and even do it at the channel level to see your overall metrics.
It's also important to keep in mind that these numbers may change over time
and should always be looked at with the larger context.
As an example, videos with very few impressions
might see a really high click-through rate
and more successful videos
might see their click-through rate decline over time.
Alright, I hope this was helpful.
Thanks for watching
and be sure to subscribe for weekly videos on growing your channel.
See you next time.