- Hello, Insiders.
I'm Patricia, I'm a product manager at YouTube Analytics,
and today we're gonna talk about some of my favorite topics,
analytics, of course,
and some of, hopefully, your favorite topics, the algorithm.
I'm here today with Rachel who is going to help us out
with some of these questions.
Rachel, do you wanna introduce yourself?
- Hi, everyone.
I've been on the channel before, I'm Rachel.
I work with Patricia on analytics,
and I also work with Tod a lot who you've seen on discovery.
So my job is to help creators
understand how discovery works,
how your videos get discovered,
and then work with Patricia
on how that becomes a feature in analytics.
So, Patricia, you're actually working
on something that I've seen before.
It's a new feature that helps creators
understand how their videos get discovered.
Can you show me what it looks like?
- Yeah, definitely.
So we've been working together on this feature
to help you understand better your video's performance,
and this is actually a new video overview in Analytics.
I think Conner actually called it out a few weeks ago
on a news flash,
so you might have seen that,
and what's new about this new analysis
is that we really call out front and center two metrics
that you've heard Tod and Tom talk about a million times;
Click through rate and Average view duration.
These are super important signals
to understand your audience interest in your topic,
in your title and your thumbnail,
as well as then your content once they start watching.
But we know that these two metrics are not the whole story,
so we wanna go in a little bit deeper today
and understand what are the cases when it's not always
about CTR and AVD, as we call it.
So, Rachel, let me just throw a few examples at you
and help me explain them.
- [Rachel] Sure.
- My video is doing super well.
I'm getting a ton of views,
and now I go and I see on this report
that click through rate is actually
as low as it's ever been.
Why does this happen?
- Yeah, so I'm really glad you asked that.
Click through rate is a really tricky metric to understand,
so a lot of creators,
if you go in and you look at your most successful videos,
the videos with the most views,
those are actually the most likely
to have the lowest click through rate.
Those videos are being shown to a really broad audience
who are less familiar with you and your content,
and it's natural for them to be less likely to click.
And on the other hand,
some of your smaller videos
that were shown to a really relevant, small,
targeted audience are the most likely to click.
And so those might have a really high click through rate.
Tod sometimes refers to this as a paradox,
and this isn't a problem for our discovery systems
because we actually have predictions
where we can tell how likely an individual user is
to click and watch a different video.
Now, however, it does make it hard sometimes for creators
to interpret your video performance and if your title
and thumbnails are working well.
And so what we recommend there
is to always look at a combination
of your click through rate and your impressions,
and this new feature that Patricia has so kindly worked
and developed hard to give you,
will help call that out for you,
and when to pay attention
to when your video might be performing
and when that's due to your title or thumbnail or not.
In the long term,
we hope to have A/B thumbnail testing eventually
that will help give you even more concrete answers.
- Okay, here's another one.
I've heard from creators
that are very aware that their click through rate
and average view duration are important metrics,
and they are concerned that by getting a lot of traffic,
let's say, from external websites or Google Search
that their average view duration is actually dropping
and they're having shorter views
and that this will ultimately hurt their performance
on Home and on Watch Next.
What do we have to say about that?
- Yeah, so I know this concerns a lot of creators
when they see those overall metrics dropping,
and as we spoke about before,
that's not always a bad thing.
So in discovery we actually look at how a video performs
in the context it's shown,
so when a video is shown on Home, how does it perform there?
And Home and Watch Next each have their own ranking models,
so in the Home example,
we're looking at when we're recommending a video on Home
to a given user,
how likely that user is to click,
watch and enjoy that video,
in addition to factors like personalization,
like how much that user already watches
that channel or topic.
So overall, click through rate and average view duration
is a pretty good indicator
about how your video's doing in general,
but it definitely doesn't cover all cases,
and each surface actually has their own ranking model,
so having more traffic from external
is not going to hurt your discovery
or how your video's being recommended in Home or Watch Next.
Sometimes you have to do deep dives
into individual traffic sources.
- The good thing about the new module
is that we actually already filter out click through rate
and average view duration just for Home and Suggested
so you don't have to worry about the effects
of external and other sources on those two metrics.
Now, let's take another case, video length.
We've heard from a bunch of you that you think it's not fair
that we compare average view duration
for videos that are of different lengths.
What do we have to say about that, Rachel?
- Yeah, so in discovery
we actually look at both relative and absolute watch time.
Those are both meaningful signals
in how your videos are gonna be recommended.
You would still need to do some cross referencing,
even if we swapped out average view duration
for average percentage viewed,
because it's easier for short videos
to hit a really high amount of average percentage watched.
We can only focus creators on so many metrics.
We chose average view duration
because how much time somebody spends with you
and your content is a really strong indicator of interest.
That being said,
we want videos of all lengths to succeed on YouTube
and get discovered.
- Okay, so here's another one we get very frequently.
Click through rate is fine,
average view duration is also fine,
yet the video is still underperforming.
For sure there must be some issue with the algorithm.
What's going on here?
- So this is also the most common question
that I receive from creators,
and click through rate and average view duration
are one of dozens of signals that we will use
for search and discovery,
but there's also a lot of other factors
that are gonna influence
how many impressions your videos get
and how many people watch them.
So I'm gonna talk about three of them;
competition, topic interest, and seasonality.
So competition is one factor
that can influence your impressions,
and that is are viewers choosing to watch more
of other videos outside of your channel on our platform?
So high competition can also limit the amount of time
that people are spending with you and your own content.
The other one is topic interest.
So some people on YouTube
will watch videos about a really niche topic,
and some topics have bigger audience sizes than others.
For example, soccer.
There are more people in the world interested in soccer
than there are in golf.
Sometimes soccer videos will get more views than golf
and that's not because our algorithm has a preference
for soccer videos,
it's just that it has a larger potential audience size
for that kind of topic.
The other one is seasonality
and that gets into platform level trends
about how many people are actually on YouTube
at different times of year watching videos.
Another key moment where we get a lot of these complaints
is September when people are starting to go back to school
and you see more viewership go towards the weekends.
So I'd say other factors
that can influence impressions are competition,
potential audience size and topic interest, and seasonality.
- So we know that even if click through rate
and average view duration are high,
there are other reasons why your video
might be performing just as usual
or perhaps underperforming.
Okay, so one final piece of feedback
that we keep getting from all of you
is around wanting to compare click through rate
and average view duration not with yourself
and your past videos,
but with other channels similar to yours.
This is actually something that we're looking into
and hopefully will have more to share
in another sneak peak coming soon,
so stay tuned for that.
Yeah, so a few of you already have this new feature
on your video overviews.
If you do have it, please check it out
and send us feedback with that blue link, Send Feedback.
The whole team reads everything you have to say to us
from engineers to designers to myself,
so we really, really appreciate that.
Keep it coming,
and if you have any other questions or comments,
just leave them in the comment section below.
Rachel, anything else to say?
- Thanks for watching,
and we really, as Patricia said, appreciate your feedback.
That helps us improve these products for all creators,
so keep it real.