- Hello, Insiders.
Today we're gonna talk about one
of the most important questions of all-time,
how to understand and how to analyze
your video and channel performance.
Over the past few years,
we've been adding a lot of tools and insights
and YouTube analytics,
but we also heard feedback that you want us
to walk you through steps
for diagnosing your video and channel performance
on your own.
So today we're gonna talk about watch time decline
and how to understand what's happening with your channel.
Let's get into it.
First, you need to understand whether it's a single video
that's causing the drop or it's a group of popular videos.
For example, it might be the case that one popular video
is experiencing decline in watch time
and is dragging total channel watch time down.
If one specific video has suddenly dropped in watch time
while others are performing well,
you can look at other factors.
For example, if it was a recent upload
and after a spike in performance,
the video's experiencing a drop-off, it's normal.
It is typical to get most of watch time
in the first few days.
Make sure the video is still set to public.
Sometimes, an accidental flip will obviously cause a drop.
And third, you probably want to check
if the video was recently claimed.
Because a claim might block your video in all countries
or in several countries.
If your channel watch time has been gradually dropping off,
you might want to answer the following questions.
Question number one,
did anything change?
Did you change thumbnails, titles, content?
Changes in content strategy can lead
to dramatic changes in your performance.
For example, I saw a channel where creators
changed thumbnails for the most popular playlists
and it almost killed the watch time.
Viewers didn't recognize their content
and didn't watch their content as a result.
Question number two,
during what time did you notice a performance drop?
So for example, you always need to expand your date range
to get a better understanding of your typical performance.
It's a typical mistake to analyze performance
at a micro level.
It's best to look at performance over time,
as channels are highly volatile,
and during the day,
your performance might experience volatility
up to 40 to 60%.
How can you check this?
Go to Creator Studio analytics overview tab,
expand main graph,
keep selected for watch time, select date range,
last 365 days or last year in the drop-down.
What should you look for?
Think of this as a sanity check.
Is performance truly dropping dramatically
or has it already hit lows like this previously?
Did you recently have a spike in watch time
and now your video performance is just normalizing?
Question number three,
is there any seasonality involved?
Each channel has unique audience
and seasonality can have significant impact
on how much time people are spending on YouTube.
Know this can be challenging to measure
if you're a new channel, but don't worry.
In some time, you also will be able
to compare to make this period-over-period comparisons.
How can you do this?
Go to watch time reports, watch time,
date range this year,
add comparison, date range last year,
or simply use quick period-over-period comparison option.
Question number four, how frequently do you upload?
Change in video uploads can directly impact watch time,
and audiences can grow accustomed
to consuming content regularly.
If you change your upload schedule,
it's normal that you can see a decline
in watch time over time.
So how can you check this.
Go to your YT Deep Dive and select videos published.
There, you can see how many videos you published
in the past 30 days, in the past year,
and you can compare if something changed over that period.
Question number four,
how do you perform among your subscribers?
So how to check this data?
Go to audience tab in YouTube analytics
and select watch time from subscribers card.
Or go to YT Deep Dive, traffic sources,
select browse features, subscriptions,
and view single line graph.
Ask yourself, "Is there a decline
in subscribers' watch time?"
If so, probably your new content isn't as engaging
as your previous videos.
And lastly, review Google Trends.
So our recommendation system follow the audience
and reflect action of viewers.
If viewers lose interest in a channel or a topic,
the content is less likely to be recommended
in tabs like home or suggested.
So use Google Trends for that.
First of all, go to your YouTube analytics report,
traffic sources, select search for a selection of keywords
to use in Google Trends,
and then to go Google Trends, trends.google.com.
Search keywords and expand date range to last five years
and filter for YouTube search.
Ask yourself, are your brand terms or channel name
declining in popularity or maybe the topic
that you are reviewing is declining in popularity?
This is quite a frequent case for gaming channels
when popularity of some games can go down,
and therefore, popularity of the channel also goes down.
These are a few ways you can better understand
what's happening with your channel,
what's causing a drop in channel performance.
And let us know if it was helpful
and if you have any specific questions in the comments.
Keep it real.