- This is a bit of a difficult video to pitch to you
because some people love this sort of stuff
while others absolutely hate it.
We're talking about YouTube numbers analytics
whether you like them loathe them
you cannot avoid them and they could help determine
the growth of your channel.
So let's jump into the shallow end of this topic.
All right then for those of you who hate analytics
here is the abridged version
impressions on YouTube leads to click-through rate
that leads to views,
views leads to watch time
in some cases that will lead to subscribers
from a watch time that leads to YouTube sharing your content
with more of the YouTube audience sometimes.
There you are thanks for watching,
goodbye.
Although it does make me wonder why I clicked on this video
in the first place.
Hello I'm Rob and welcome to vidIQ the youtube tool
and channel that aims to educate you
on your youtube journey and chat lot success in 2019.
Throughout this series we wanna help you get more views
and more subscribers to ultimately grow your channel.
To watch a full playlist that click over here
and if you want to keep up to date
with all of the awesome stuff we do here at vidIQ
every single week including a live stream
where we audit your channels
make sure to subscribe and click on the notification bell.
Also one final thing on a completely unrelated note
have you noticed there is more light
in this area of your screen now?
It's because I forgot to close the curtains
and now we've got lots of natural light
streaming into the office.
So I need to fix that but we're gonna have all sorts
of continuity issues as this video progresses.
Bear with me.
(soft upbeat music)
That's fixed it.
All right then let's get down to business.
This right here is a thumbnail and title
from a Philip DeFranco video.
He's a fantastic video creator
and i highly recommend watching some of his stuff.
We are seeing this on the YouTube homepage
but it could also appear in search results,
subscription fees, watch history of a trending page,
in recommendations and in video playlists.
Very simply put this is classed as an impression
every time someone sees more than 50%
of a thumbnail on screen that video gets one impression.
What impressions effectively represent on YouTube
is free advertising for your content.
Every time that thumbnail and title is put in front
of a potential viewer they could click on it
and become an actual viewer.
We will circle back round to the importance
of impressions that later on in this video
but to summarize all analytics start with impressions.
I mean somebody has to see the thumbnail in the title
in order to click on it.
So where do we find out this information.
Strap yourselves in folks we're gonna take a look
at your analytics for your channel
in order to do this on most YouTube pages
you will see your channel icon in the top right hand corner
click there and then click on creator studio
if it looks like this which is the old version
you want to make sure you go to the beta studio
so click on the link in the top left-hand corner here
and eventually you should end up with a page
that looks something like this.
The reason I'm sending you
to the new channel analytics page or creator studio
as YouTube likes to call it
is because impressions are not available
in the old analytics pages.
So to look at your channel analytics
down the left hand side you have some options here
click on analytics this will show you your channel analytics
and along the top here you have several tabs
and you want to click on reach viewers
and this will give you a breakdown of impressions
over the last 28 days for your channel.
So as an example the thumbnails from our videos
here at vidIQ we're seen 6.7 million times
over the last 28 days.
To really understand what impressions means
we'll return to visit later on
but I do want to show you a couple more things
while we're in the analytics.
If you click on overview
and then click on the top videos box
this will list your best performing videos
and you can see a rundown of individual impressions
for different videos here so something to track
if you want a more granular view
of how videos are performing with impressions.
Now the impressions analytics in isolation
mean absolutely nothing.
You could have a billion impressions
but if nobody ever clicks on any of your thumbnails
and watches your contents then it's meaningless.
However if somebody does see a thumbnail
and decides to click on it that converts the impression
into a view and this is known as click-through rate.
Time for a very basic example
let's go back to our Philip DeFranco video
and let's save this for now was seen eleven million times
or eleven million impressions.
We can see the video has at 1.1 million views
and those views represent how many times a video
was clicked on hence a very simple calculation
of 10% click-through rate from impressions to views.
You will find your click-through rate
in the same place you find impressions
on your channel analytics under reach viewers.
If you click on the box it will change the graph
to represent what your click-through rate is.
Ours over the last 28 days is 4.2%.
In the flow of YouTube metrics
click-through rate is the first important number
to start analyzing.
It basically grades your thumbnails and your titles
if they're more intriguing, enticing, interesting,
exciting, people are gonna click on them
and your click-through rate will go up.
Now at this point a lot of people want
to ask the question well what is a good a click-through rate
for my channel.
YouTube will tell you the averages between 2% and 10%
but if you approach click-through rate analysis
from this point of view you're doing it all wrong
and this is the reason why.
This time last year our click-through rate or CTR
was at 2.7% and we knew we needed to improve that.
So we worked a lot on our titling strategy
and especially on our thumbnails
so that they went from looking like this
to looking like this.
Personal tastes that may lead some of you
to prefer the thumbnail on the left
but I'm convinced the majority of you will prefer
the thumbnail on the right.
The results of these improvements as you saw earlier
is that our CTR now sits around 4.2%.
Which doesn't sound much
but when you calculate the actual difference
our videos are now a 55% more likely
to be clicked on than this time last year.
This is why your video title and thumbnail is so important.
You could make the greatest video content in the world
but if you don't spend enough time trying to convince
a potential viewer to click on that little box
on a YouTube page you could be missing out on thousand,
millions of views for a relatively small amount of work.
And of course we're delighted from where we've come from
but we still wanna go further
we wanna continue to increase our click-through rates
so that's what you should do
look at your click-through rate today
set that as your benchmark and aim to improve on it
with every single videos that you make.
So impressions represents how often
your content is advertised to an audience
and CTR represents how often that audience
clicks on those advertisements to watch you're content
and that leads us to views now yes
views are very good as a headline statement.
This video went viral and got 5 million views
but from a video creators perspective,
views aren't really that interesting
the views are kinda like the beam at the top of a lighthouse
everybody can see that
but they don't appreciate all other foundations
and fundamentals that go into how that beam operates.
And in the past that views would have been super important
but the YouTube algorithm is a little more sophisticated
than that.
Essentially a view represents a visit
to a video but it doesn't tell you how long the visitor
was watching that video
and that's where we get to perhaps
the most important analytic on YouTube,
watch time.
Watch time literally is the amount of time
each viewer spends watching a video.
As a simple example Video A is 2 minutes long
and let's say that each viewer who watches the video
views the entire video.
Don't worry we'll come back to the duration in a minute.
That means if a video is watched 1000 times
for 100% of its length
that equals 2,000 minutes of total watch time.
But let's be honest
nobody ever watches an entire YouTube video right?
So let's make this a little more realistic.
Video B is a 10 minute video
but on average people only watch half of the video
which leaves us with a view duration of 5 minutes.
Video B also only gets half of the views that Video A did
but when you times at 5 minutes by 500 views
you still end up with more watch time than Video A.
Now granted this is an oversimplification of a watch time
and it gets a lot more complicated
and I noticed some of you asking questions such as
well should I just make longer videos.
Remember we're jumping into the shallow end of analytics
in this particular video
and we'll touch on watch time throughout this series
later on in a year.
There's some very simple logic that we all need to follow
the longer you spend watching videos the happier YouTube is
the longer you spend on the platform
the more opportunities YouTube has to serve at you
with adverts.
Everybody wins in that situation
and with all that in mind let's go back to our analytics.
Currently we are on the reach viewers tab
if I click on the overview tab
this will give me the total watch time for the vidIQ channel
over the last 28 days which is 1.3 million minutes.
We've also just talked about average view duration
of your video so if you want to see of that statistic
the interest viewers tab is where you want to go
and currently on vidIQ we're at
two minutes thirty two per video.
Now obviously this doesn't take into account
the length of videos so if you wanted to go into more detail
you would have to click on a particular video.
So we're gonna go to the video list here
and we'll choose what one of the videos from the list
let's go for this most recent one
how to grow your channel fast in 2019
then click on analytics
then go to interest viewers here
and it can tell us that the view duration for this video
is four minutes 13 so a lot higher
than average on the channel.
Now generally speaking longer videos
obviously means more watch time
and if you can get your watch time
above say eight to 10 minutes
that seems to be a sweet spot
for YouTube promoting your content more
but that's not always a case
remember that say a general rule.
For example if there is a channel called Lucas spider
which has nearly 3 million subscribers
and every single video on their channel
is less than a minute
and yet their videos have tens of millions of views.
Now one obvious reason for this
is because the content is amazing.
The animation is on a Disney level scale
and another potential reason might be
because of session watch time.
Yeah we're getting a little bit deeper now into analytics
let me explain this one.
While a one Lucas the spider video
might be 50 seconds long,
two videos makes it more than a minute,
four videos makes it more than two minutes and so on.
If your content keeps a viewer on YouTube
watching more videos this is known as session watch time
and since kids love watching the same thing
over and over again driving their parents insane
you can bet that despite these being short form videos
they will generate billions of minutes of watch time.
Now people will binge watch your content
if they fall in love with it
and that means watching every single video
from start to finish.
And this is where we start to look at average view duration
as we've clicked for rate we've worked hard at vidIQ
over last year to improve our average view duration
moving from one minute 38 seconds to two minutes 32 seconds.
On average people are watching our content
43% longer than they were last year.
So as before rather than trying to set yourself
a lofty ambitious goal,
set a current benchmark and aim to improve on that.
But all of this is at a channel level
to get the full story you need
to dig into your individual videos.
To do this click on the videos link
and choose a video that you want
to look at the average view duration for.
We're gonna choose this video for this example
and then go to analytics
and what you'll have here on the overview screen
is audience retention which is shown for this current video
it's watched an average of two minutes 48 seconds
which is 52% of the videos total length.
Now again I'm going to generalize somewhat
but if you can get your average audience retention
over 50% on your videos
you're generally doing a pretty good job
and again you could use this as a benchmark.
Aim for a point where you can get 50% audience retention
on your videos
and then increase the video length
and still try and maintain that audience retention
and your watch time will start to grow.
So we've talked about impressions,
we've talked about click-through rate,
we've touched on views and we've gone into detail
about watch time, view duration and audience retention
but what does all of this collectively mean.
Well this is where we come to something super critical
for your channel and yet it is so tiny.
A single orange sliver of a line
which basically tells you
how much YouTube likes your channel.
For this one let's start from the beginning
because it's quite an important analytic.
From the dashboard click on analytics
and then go to the reach viewers section again at the top
and this is the funnel that you want
impressions and how they lead to watch time.
This neatly shows all the important analytics
we've already talked about
impressions, click-through rate, views and watch time
but what's new here is this golden nugget of information
how often YouTube recommends your content
versus how often viewers are seeking out your content.
Remember that impressions represent free advertising
from YouTube so you want as much of this line
as orange as possible
and if you click this information icon
it will break this line down even further.
Recommended on watch page, recommended on home pages
that's where your channel will grow the most organically
reaching new audiences every single day.
And look what it says right at the bottom.
You can increase the chance
of YouTube suggesting your content by increasing
your click-through rates and your video watch time.
Makes me wonder why didn't use this line
at the very beginning of a video
and I would have saved us all 15 minutes
but hey I need the watch time
if YouTube likes both your click-through rate and watch time
it can have a dramatic effect on your videos.
This is data from a single video we publish before Christmas
on PewDiePie.
And YouTube shared it everywhere
helping it to over 350 thousand views
that's more than 10 times the normal number of views
we might expect and remember what I said earlier
while the views may be the headline statement
it's the high click-through rate
with the high audience retention
that probably has a lot to do with why this video
was so successful.
Now I appreciate that YouTube analytics
can be quite daunting
especially if you've never used them before
or numbers aren't your thing.
So I hope through this video
you've learned some of the terminology
and the important numbers as waiver homework
do let us know in the comments below
what your channel click-through rate is
and your average view duration.
And don't worry I know we've barely touched views
in this video and we haven't looked at subscribers at all
in terms of YouTube analytics.
We're gonna save those for dedicated videos later on
in this series.
Now if this video has left you wanting more
from YouTube analytics
don't forget to try the vidIQ channel audit tool.
Once you open that screen it's gonna give you
a massive information that can really help your channel
it's kinda like having a YouTube consultant 24/7.
If you haven't already downloaded vidIQ
make sure to do so it will help you research YouTube,
analyze videos, audit your channel as I've just said
and take actual steps to help grow your channel.
If you want to see more from this series
that's going to chart your success on YouTube in 2019
the full playlist is here for more awesome vidIQ stuff
there's another playlist down here
enjoy the rest of your video making day
we'll see you on eve reverse videos
unless you wanna watch this.
Come on YouTube
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