- You know, it's been an interesting year
when it comes to YouTube analytics.
We've got some brand new ones.
We even got an entirely new creator studio
which is still in beta.
So what about 2019, what should you be focusing on
to help grow your channel?
Let's take a look.
I wasn't supposed to do that.
- vidIQ. - vidIQ
- [Announcer] Vidiq.com.
- Yeah, I almost had a disaster there.
What I usually do with the intro is put my hand
over the lens, but I was a bit quick in my actions,
and I prodded it with my finger,
and it wasn't attached to the tripod properly,
and we almost had a disaster.
Whew.
Hello folks, welcome to vidIQ, my name is Rob.
If this is your first time
in these glorious YouTube surroundings,
we are the YouTube tool and channel
that aims to help you get more views
in less time by educating you on your YouTube journey.
We do have a Chrome extension, which will help you do
just that by researching YouTube, analyzing videos,
auditing your own channel and taking actual steps.
It is free to download, there is a link
in the video description.
And today is gonna be a bit of a combination of the two,
YouTube analytics on the one side, vidIQ analytics
on the other side, but let's start
with that new creator beta studio.
First thing we need to do is visit the beta studio.
If you haven't been there already,
if you're on the classic creator studio,
as it's now called, you'll see this big blue link
in the top left hand corner.
If you click there, you'll see a radically different
analytics page, and it's constantly evolving.
It could look different to this by the time you see
the page as it's changing every single day.
If you want to go back to the classic studio,
you've got a link here, but also, if you click on settings,
you can change default creator experience
to either classic or beta, whichever you prefer.
If you do want to look at the new analytics
that we're going to share with you today,
you do have to go to the YouTube beta studio,
and the classic creator studio will be decommissioned
at some point in 2019.
The first analytic we want to look at is click through rate.
(upbeat music)
Put very quickly, a click through rate
is a number of times that somebody clicks on one
of your thumbnails or titles from the amount of times
it's been seen.
So in this example, three people saw this subscribe pillow,
and one of them chose to pick it up.
That's a click through rate essentially of 33.3%.
With that in mind, in the creator beta studio,
from the dashboard, you want to click on analytics,
you'll see a range of tabs at the top here
of your channel analytics, and you want
to click on reviewer, and this will show the impressions,
so that's how many times a thumbnail is seen,
and then the click through rate,
how many times somebody's actually clicked
on one of those titles or thumbnails
to watch one of your videos.
If you click on the click through rate panel,
that will show you the click through rate
of the last 28 days, and you can also go to different cards
in the YouTube analytics and look at a breakdown
of click through rates.
So if I click on top videos here,
it will list the click through rate
for individual videos as well.
You know I'm positive something's changed in the background,
but I can't workout what it is.
Let me know in the comments.
All right, now you know what a click through rate is,
why should you care?
There's three reasons that I can think of.
First and foremost, before content,
somebody's got to see what you have to offer,
and that's through your thumbnail and your title,
so essentially, every single analytic
in your YouTube channel trickles down
from click through rate.
They've got to actually click on your thumbnail
to watch your contents.
So we've got watch time, subscribers, comments,
and all of the rest of the good stuff.
Second, and it's one of these classic
Rob Wilson catchphrases, so do remember it.
Viewers judge videos by their thumbnails
just as readers judge books by their covers,
so it's really important to have a good first impression.
And finally, although curiously this section
is divided into three sections itself,
your click through rate represents intrigue,
and what I mean by that is intrigue of a topic,
intrigue of a thumbnail, and intrigue of a title.
As a very recent example of this, and no doubt you've seen
on our channel, we were covering a topic
of PewDiePie versus T Series, and the subscriber rate,
and because it was a very intriguing topic at the time,
and we used some very targeted keywords,
and some colorful thumbnails, our click through rate
for that particular topic went through the roof.
Now here's something really important to remember
about click through rate.
It's not an exact science.
When people say what should my click through rate be,
the YouTube answer is an average of between 2 and 10%.
Our answer is improve on what
your current click through rate is.
Click through rate varies from video topic to video topic,
and it's heavily influenced by where you are simply
in the order of suggested videos and search pages.
If you're at the top of a search pages,
you can have a terrible thumbnail,
but you will have a high click through rate
just because of the prime real estate
of where you are on YouTube.
Don't get caught up too much
over where your click through rate is
versus somebody's else's.
Look at your click through rate, and aim to improve it
one or two percentage points over 2019.
That will bring in a significant number of views.
(scratching)
(lid opening)
(popping)
(blowing)
Why can't I do that?
(blowing)
Sorry, I didn't realize you were waitin' for me there.
Audience retention.
(upbeat music)
Channel analytics can give you some insight
into average view duration, but when you've been running
a live stream for a few days, that causes complete havoc.
So what you wanna do is look at audience retention
on individual videos.
To do this, click on the videos icon,
and then find the video that you want to investigate.
We'll look at hashtags here,
and then when you start to look at
the individual analytics for a video,
you see audience retention here,
and this is the box that you really want
to start studying.
If you mouse over the graph,
you'll see the audience retention at that point in a video.
Something else we can also do is actually click
on a point and then press play,
and so you can see the audience retention in line
with the video in realtime.
So, there was a significant drop off there,
maybe I need to investigate why.
There was a spike in audience retention here,
so maybe I did something right.
It's all about going through each of your videos
with a fine tooth comb to find what works
on your videos and what doesn't.
Look, we all know that watch time is the ultimate king
on YouTube, so you might just say well instead of trying
to work on audience retention,
why don't I just make longer videos,
and yeah, you could do that,
but let's try to reverse engineer this for a second.
Generally speaking, if you can get your audience retention
above 50% on videos, YouTube tends to favor that content.
So whether your videos are two minutes long,
four minutes long, six minutes long,
aim first to make your content better
to improve audience retention,
and then start to think about making longer videos
if that's what you want to do with your content
to get more watch time,
and lead to the magic YouTube formula.
On each individual video, you have likes and dislikes,
and vidIQ has a funky little tool
that turns it into a likes to dislikes ratio.
Well, what if YouTube had the same thing
for your entire channel?
Well they do, and this is it.
YouTube recommended content.
When viewers watch your content and enjoy it,
they watch it for longer, and YouTube loves this.
When YouTube loves your content,
they want to share it with more people.
That means putting it on the home page, browse features,
the suggested videos on watch pages,
and the more you can push this line into the orange,
the more YouTube is doing all the hard work for you.
It's recommending your content,
so rather than people having to search and find your content
or finding it through the subscription feeds,
which they're already aware of,
they're finding it in random places,
and it's almost being forced upon them
because YouTube wants to share your content
with a wider audience.
So if you can manipulate this magic formula
and get this orange line to be more orange and less gray,
that works for you.
How do you do that?
Well that's done through engaging thumbnails,
intriguing titles, which are then clicked onto,
and then you have a lot of watch time on your content.
As we say, getting above 50% with your audience retention.
And it just so happens
that vidIQ has the perfect illustration of this in action.
Take a look at our September analytics.
Two and a half million impressions,
and if I mouse over the information panel,
it shows us a breakdown of where those impressions were
on recommended homepage and watch page,
but so many people having to find our content.
But if I change our analytics to October
when the T Series versus PewDiePie,
subscriber rates was in full flow.
Look at the radical change here.
17 million impressions,
and YouTube was recommending our content way more,
especially on home pages.
So a lot of people were finding this story very interesting,
and we were one of the leading channels on this.
Led to a click through rate
which was significantly higher than before.
One and a half million views, watch time up as well.
So we were feeding YouTube exactly what they wanted,
they were loving the content and sharing it
with a much wider audience.
Oh, by the way, if you are enjoying this video,
don't forget to smash the like button,
but at the same time, if you haven't already done so,
gently click the subscribe
because we've only got one of these.
The reason I'm asking you to do that
is because that's what we're gonna look at next,
converting your audience into subscribers.
(upbeat music)
I may be missing something here in the new analytics,
but I can't find a good way to show you subs gained
from videos in the new studio,
so we're going old school here.
If you go to the classic creator studio analytics,
go down to subscribers, and then on top level page,
if you click YouTube watch page, this will show you
all of the videos that are converting viewers
into subscribers, really valuable stuff here.
Let's put all this into a loose business analogy.
Your YouTube channel is your shop,
and people look through the window,
the thumbnails and the titles,
and they're intrigued enough
to enter your place of business.
They have a look around, but nothing catches their fancy,
they move on, but there are those who are interested
in what you have to offer,
and maybe they purchase something,
and those are your subscribers,
repeat return customers to your content.
There is no analytic that tracks trust,
but think about when you subscribe to a channel,
why do you do it?
It usually revolves around some element of trust,
whether it be to entertain, educate,
or emotionally impact you.
People who subscribe to your channel from a video watch page
usually do it from a light bulb moment,
something that instinctively and instantly drives them
to click that button.
We have a tool within vidIQ which can help you look
at subs gained a lot quicker than through YouTube analytics.
It's the subs gained column on our channel audit,
and ironically here, we can see
that one of our better performing videos
for bringing subs into our channel
is a video all about how to create
a subscribe button watermark.
If you click on the view more section here,
you can see all of the videos that are driving viewers
to turn into subscribers.
It's almost like your trust column,
so one that's definitely worth checking out.
We have click through rate,
we've also got audience retention,
YouTube recommended content, and subscribers gained.
Out of those four analytics,
which do you think is the most important one?
Let us know in the voting poll up here,
and the reason we're asking you that
is because we're seguing nicely onto analytic number five,
audience engagement.
(upbeat music)
We said earlier that gaining subscribers through your videos
is like building trust with your audience.
Gaining comments, likes, and dislikes through your videos
is building engagements,
and that's another really important facet of YouTube,
which you should be keeping an eye on.
Strictly speaking, YouTube doesn't track engagement rate,
but fortunately our channel audit tool does
through this column here, so you can see what videos
are generating conversation, or whether they're polarizing
in terms of how many people react to it
with likes and dislikes.
Astonishingly here, we have one video
with 68% engagement rate,
but that's because we were having a little bit of fun
with YouTube premieres.
Do check that out if you have time.
In terms of engagement rates, we also want to look
at the finer points as well.
If we scroll down the channel audit page,
we can look at how often the end screens are clicked on,
you know those boxes right at the end of videos.
You can check here, and maybe make changes
and see if those changes are effective,
and also the interactive click card rate.
Usually they can be in the single digit percentage,
but polls do awesomely well, trust me,
whenever you have a voting poll in your videos,
it does really well.
Here you might be asking how on earth does a poll
get 122% click through rate.
This is likely because on one
of our PewDiePie versus T Series live streams,
we had a poll of which team do you support,
and people must have been clicking on that card so much
to see the results after they'd voted
that it was just being clicked on so often by viewers
when they were returning to the live stream,
so lots of useful information to take a look at here.
And, as a final thought on engagement,
do not forget the community tab if you have access to it.
It is so powerful.
In recent days, we've been putting out polls
and asking questions that are getting more feedback
from the videos themselves, so if you do have
the opportunity to canvas your audience with a voting poll
about what video you should make next
or just get general feedback on things
or start a conversation, do not forget the community tab.
All right then, here is the most important piece
of advice in the entire video, and I've left it until
the end so I do hope my audience retention has held out.
All of these analytics are of course very important,
but in 2019, what I want you to do is take action
on the data that you're getting from YouTube and vidIQ.
It's all well and good knowing what YouTube is telling you,
but if then you do exactly the same things
and expect different results, that's a sign of insanity.
And with all that being said,
it's time to eat some of our own dog food.
These are the two end screens you're most likely
to click on according to YouTube analytics.
Prove us right, we'll see you in those videos
in just a couple of ticks.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day,
and of course, 2019.