- As a new YouTube content creator,
there are some things that you need to know about YouTube,
about your audience, about your videos,
so when you're publishing videos,
you can just deeply understand exactly what is going on.
And the reason this is important
is because if you understand
how people are responding to your content,
it can help you make better content,
which, in turn, will help you get more views,
will help you get more subscribers,
and all the things that you want from your YouTube content.
So I'm going to explain to you a list of words
that you need to know as a YouTube content creator.
I'm gonna tell you the word,
I'm gonna tell you why it's important, and what it means,
and how it relates to you as a content creator.
Now, as I'm doing this,
he is going to be playing the handpan.
And I got to be honest, he's not that good at it,
but he just wanted to get some practice
and just give you some nice music to listen to
in the background.
So it'll probably be pretty messy,
but we're gonna roll with it anyway,
and I'm going to share these words with you
to help you do better on YouTube
and just better understand the platform.
So, the very first word on our list is YouTube analytics.
What your YouTube analytics are,
is they are the statistics behind your YouTube channel.
Your YouTube analytics are a reflection
of how people respond to your content on YouTube.
So it's really important that you understand,
not only your analytics,
but the words that are behind your analytics.
I'm just gonna focus you on a handful
because these are some of the core most important ones,
starting with impressions.
What an impression is,
is an impression is when YouTube shows your content
to somebody on any page on YouTube,
in the mobile app, on TVs, things like that.
So when it comes to your impressions,
a lot of content creators,
especially ones that are just getting started,
we'll say to themselves,
"Hey, YouTube isn't showing my content to people."
Well, one way that you can check to see
if YouTube is showing your content to people
is you can go into your YouTube analytics
and you can look at your impressions.
When it comes to your impressions,
you're going to see that YouTube is giving you impressions.
Now, from that, it shows you
that YouTube is showing your content
to people on the platform.
So if you're not getting views,
that means that you're not able to convert people
into a view when YouTube shows your thumbnail title
to somebody on the platform.
So the next word that we have related directly to this
is called click-through-rate.
Now, when it comes to your click-through-rate,
this is often referred to as CTR,
but your click-through-rate is
how well you can convert a potential viewer
compared to the impressions that YouTube is giving you
or how much YouTube is showing your content
to people on the platform.
As part of this, one thing that's really important to know
is, as it relates to your click-through-rate,
typically on YouTube, it's much more difficult
to maintain a high click-through-rate
when you have a high amount of impressions.
So because of that,
it's really easy for content creators to think
that they have a really good click-through-rate,
when they only have, let's say 50 impressions
or 100 impressions on a video.
But when it comes to your click-through-rate,
it's really important
because the higher your click-through-rate,
that means the better you are
at getting people to click on your video
when YouTube gives it an impression
or shows it to people on the platform.
Your click-through-rate
is one of the most important metrics on YouTube.
So because of that, you wanna make sure
that you are paying really close attention
to your click-through-rate in your videos.
But when it comes to your click-through-rate,
you don't want to just look
at your click-through-rate;
in general, you actually want to dig
into our next word, which is traffic sources.
Your traffic sources are where YouTube is telling you
exactly where your viewers are coming from on the platform
or off of the platform.
And the reason that your traffic sources are important
is because based on where it is
that you're trying to get views from,
or if you're trying to get views from everywhere,
it's really important to make sure
that you're understanding your traffic sources
so you can see where you're falling short
or where you're underperforming.
For example, in some cases you might find
that you're doing great in suggested videos
but you're not doing great on homepages.
Or you might find out
that you're doing great in YouTube search
but you're not doing great on homepages.
So what that means when you identify this information
is that means that when people are looking for your content,
it's relatively easy for you to get people to click
and enjoy your content in YouTube search.
However, the fail point,
if you find that you're way underperforming
in your click-through-rate from homepages,
the fail point there means that you're just not good yet
at capturing somebody's attention
when they're not looking for your content,
or when they're logging onto YouTube
they're expecting to watch something else
and your content gets presented to them
on the YouTube homepage.
If you can't get people to click there,
then you can identify that through your traffic sources
by looking at your click-through-rate
and your impressions on the homepage,
and as you're looking at that information,
you can start to look for those fail points
to see where you need to improve.
If you notice that on homepages you're not doing well,
then typically that comes down to your content
just not being identifiable
to the people that you're trying to reach.
Same exact thing goes,
if you're looking at suggested traffic
and you notice that with suggested videos
that you're not doing well there,
typically that means that your thumbnail,
maybe everything's too small in your thumbnail,
people can't really identify your video,
or what it might be about,
or why it might be important to them,
or maybe your title's getting cut off
and they can't fully understand exactly
what your video's about.
But when you notice these things, then you can go in
and you can try to figure out what the problem is
so that you know how to fix it.
And then you'll get more views, you'll do better
in all the stuff that you want as a YouTuber.
When it comes to browse features,
because this is a traffic source,
what your browse features are, is that your homepage,
that is your subscription feed,
that's also the Explore tab on YouTube as well.
And then suggested videos, which is our next word,
is videos that are being recommended next to other videos
on YouTube.
YouTube search
is when people go up to the YouTube search bar
and they type in a specific word or phrase
and then your content shows up there.
And then for traffic sources, you also have external.
Now, when it comes to external,
that means that you are bringing people onto YouTube.
So in some cases, that might be from Google.
You might find external as a website
that's linking to one of your videos,
and you can use this when you're paying attention,
looking in your analytics and you're seeing all this stuff,
if you notice a website is sending you a lot of viewers,
that's a great opportunity for you
to reach out to that website and say,
"Hey, I notice that you're sending me a lot of traffic
to this particular video,
is there anything that I can do for you?
Or when I publish new content,
would you like me to let you know about it,"
and things like that,
because they are clearly seeing value
in what it is that you're doing enough
that they are going to post it on their website.
So when you are looking in your traffic sources
and you're seeing this type of information
in terms of what your click-through-rate looks like,
your average view duration,
where your views are coming from,
that really helps you identify where you're doing well,
where you're not
so that you can make whatever improvements you need
in order to do well.
The next word you should know about is watch time.
You're gonna hear people talking about watch time
all over the place on YouTube.
If you watch my videos, if you watch videos like mine,
you hear other content creators talking about YouTube.
Watch time is gonna be another major win
that people focus on a lot.
So when it comes to watch time,
that is the total amount of time
people spend watching your video.
That's what watch time is.
And it's extremely important to YouTube.
In fact, back in October of 2012,
YouTube changed the importance of watch time
to where they started focusing all satisfaction information
on how long people watch videos for.
So because of that, watch time is extremely important.
And that is a word that you need to know.
But within watch time,
we also have something called session time.
Now, session time
is how long people spend on the platform itself.
So the way that you wanna look at session time is let's say,
that in your traffic sources
you find that you're bringing in external traffic.
Well, if you're bringing in external traffic,
you're actually starting sessions on YouTube.
And when you're starting sessions on YouTube,
that's a fantastic sign to YouTube
that you're bringing people to YouTube
which is something that they want.
So because of that, your job as a content creator
is to ensure that you keep people watching
and that you get more watch time for those viewers.
But the idea is you wanna keep people on YouTube
and you wanna prevent them from ending their session.
So the way that you do this is, of course,
chaining your videos together,
or creating what I call watch time trap,
so you keep people watching more than one video at a time,
or that you just send them off to other videos,
or you don't do anything
to cause that viewer to leave YouTube.
Next is your audience retention.
When it comes to your audience retention,
that is how long people are watching your videos for
but it's an actual graph that YouTube gives you.
So when it comes to your videos,
when you publish a video on YouTube,
and this can be a YouTube Short, a live stream,
an actual piece of normal video content,
when you publish all these things to YouTube,
then they show you a report.
It's a second by second report
that is a reflection of how people are responding
to your videos on average.
So when you use your audience retention reports,
what you can do, is you can go in
and you can look for problems in your video.
And you can look for places in your video
where people drop off.
You can look for places in your video where you get spikes.
You can look for places in your video video
where people aren't leaving,
they're just sitting there
just super interested in the content.
And you can use this to make better videos
for people that are responding to them.
Now, when it comes to your audience retention,
you have absolute retention,
which is how people are responding to that particular video,
your video, second by second, on average,
and then you also have something called
relative audience retention.
Relative audience retention is how your videos compare
to other videos of similar length on the platform.
So you wanna use this so that you can look and see
how your videos are performing.
So, if you look
and you see that your videos are underperforming,
they're below average,
then that means you gotta work on those parts of the videos
so that you can make better videos
and bring your content to a level
that's more competitive for YouTube,
because this is a competition.
In fact, it's a competition for click-through-rate
and it's a competition for watch time and session time.
Next is average duration.
Now, when it comes to average duration,
this is also known as AVD,
that's typically how we refer to it,
like on the flyer quickly,
but with average duration,
that's also how long people are watching your videos,
so you wanna look at that like it's watch time,
because it is.
Then you have average percentage viewed, or APV.
Now, the difference there is,
your average duration
is how many total minutes you are getting for each viewer
when they're coming through that video.
Your average percentage viewed
is how much of your video did they complete?
Both of these things are taken into account
when YouTube is determining
if people are enjoying your content or not.
And of course, the elephant in the room is,
the more people that enjoy your content,
the better your videos are gonna do on the platform.
Next is your end screen click-through-rate.
But before we talk about that,
I wanna talk about end screens, or end screen elements.
So on YouTube, when a video is playing,
you're going to see boxes pop up
at the very end of the video.
So if you're not using these yet,
these are called end screens.
This is a great way to increase watch time on your channel
and increase session time on YouTube.
So the idea when it comes to your end screens
is you want to add videos to your end screens
that will keep the viewer interested
or keep the viewer watching.
So at the end of this video,
I'm going to recommend that you go and watch another video.
And that recommendation is going to be based on this video
targeting new YouTube content creators.
So you'll see that here at the end of the video.
But when it comes to your end screens,
another important word
is your end screen click-through-rate.
And when it comes to your end screen click-through-rate,
this is really important when it comes to YouTube,
because if you can get people completing a video,
that's a really high satisfaction signal to YouTube
in terms of, that tells the system,
the algorithm of YouTube,
that people are enjoying your content.
And then if you have a high percentage
of a click-through-rate on your end screens,
that also tells YouTube
that people are enjoying your content so much
that they're not just watching one video
but they're watching multiple videos,
which is a huge satisfaction signal to YouTube.
And you're increasing the session time
that we talked about before,
you're increasing the total watch time on your channel,
all the things that YouTube loves.
So because of that, you wanna make sure
that you are being mindful
of your end screen click-through-rate as well.
Next, we have the hook.
You're gonna hear a lot of YouTube help channels
talking about the hook.
You're gonna hear a lot of people
that are high-level YouTubers talking about the hook.
What the hook is,
is, what happens when you start your video?
So the hook essentially is where you entice a viewer
at the start of your video to continue watching the video.
Because as we all know,
getting people to watch your videos over 30 seconds
and just for as long as possible is really important,
but if you don't have a good hook
or something enticing at the beginning of your video
to help inform them, or show them, or excite them,
or create some type of curiosity gap,
then there's a really high likelihood
the viewers are gonna leave that particular video
and it's going to underperform.
The idea with the hook, though,
is that you essentially want to use it
to talk to your viewer
as they're coming into the video, to let them know,
"Hey, this is what we're gonna be doing.
This is what I'm gonna be showing you.
This is the game that we're gonna be playing.
This is the recipe that I'm gonna be showing you."
And then you also want to add another element to it
that makes it about the viewer.
So for example, if it was a cooking video,
then you could say,
"I'm gonna show you how to do this recipe
and under this amount of time
so you don't waste time cooking dinner all night," right?
So then what you're doing there
is you're telling them what they're gonna get,
and then you're making it about them
by telling them how they are going to benefit
from watching your video.
Next, we have the hand off, what the handoff is,
is where you hand off that viewer
from one video to another video.
Now, the way that you do this is by using your end screens
that I was talking about before.
Now, when you are doing this properly,
how you wanna do a handoff
is you want to essentially lead the viewer
into the next video that they should be watching.
So there's a few different ways that you can do this,
or actually a lot of different ways that you can do this,
but the idea is to just think about, "Okay
the person that watched this particular video,
what do they care about in terms of,
how is this video relevant to them?
And what other videos on my channel
would also be extremely relevant to this viewer
based on what it is that they came in and just watched?"
And then you wanna recommend another video
or hand off another video to that viewer
so that you will increase your session time plus
so that it's easy for them to find the content
that they want to watch on your channel.
Now, once you're monetized,
there's some additional things
that you're going to need to know as well.
So for example, CPM, RPM, that sort of thing.
But right now, if you're watching this video,
there's a good chance you're not monetized yet.
So because of that, I have a video on my channel
that's going to show you
how to get views on YouTube officially,
according to YouTube,
and that's going to help you hurry up
and get your first 1000 subscribers
and your 4,000 hours of watch time
so you can get monetized.
I'm gonna put a link to that right here.
You can go ahead and click on that now.
What I just did is the handoff,
but seriously, you should go ahead and click into that now
because it's gonna be super helpful for you.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll see you next time.