- Hello insiders.
I'm Elena.
I'm a product specialist working on YouTube analytics.
As probably all of you know,
recently we launched a new feature called Shorts.
Shorts are a new video or a new short video format
and we've seen a lot of comments
and a lot of questions about this feature.
And we want to talk today
about how shorts will influence your metrics
and YouTube analytics.
Some of the metrics will remain the same
and some of the metrics might change.
So we invited Fiona to talk about this topic in detail
Fiona do you want to say a couple of words
about what you're working on?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So to introduce myself,
hi, I'm Fiona, I'm a product manager on YouTube analytics.
And I,
we've been spending a couple of months
sort of doing some work to make sure
that kind of shorts make sense and YouTube analytics
and sort of don't get too confusing, hopefully.
- All right.
So let's start with how,
can I see how many views shorts are driving to my channel
in analytics?
- Yeah.
So maybe first of all to clarify,
just how views are counted for shorts
they are counted the same way
as for shorts as for regular videos.
So they also contribute to your channel level view count
and sort of don't get filtered out in any way.
You can see how many views you get from shorts
by looking at the traffic source type card
on the reach tab of YouTube analytics.
And you can also go into advanced analytics
to see the same information.
And if you click on the traffic source types there,
you will see a row for shorts.
And it's important to mention that all of the views
that are classified in that traffic source type,
are the ones from viewers sort of swiping up to your video
in the shorts player.
If people are clicking onto your short from the home tab,
those would still be marked
as kind of the in the normal browse traffic source
as before.
- Okay. So I assume shorts might decrease
channel average view duration ,
click through rate
or potentially RPM?
Is that correct?
- Yeah. So they could change
if you do have a lot of shorts
your average reiteration could go down
because of course the videos are shorter.
This shouldn't hurt your channel performance in any way
it's just kind of an attribute of the video.
Same thing for click through rate
because most people will sort of swipe to your video
rather than click on it based on a thumbnail
that metric might also change,
but again, it shouldn't really impact your performance.
RPM is a little bit special
because the views in the shorts player aren't monetized.
And so we are actually filtering those out
from the RPM population
so that it doesn't get too impacted and confusing,
because you could have seen a drop if we had left it in,
because if you get a lot of and monetized views,
the RPM could drop since it is sort of essentially revenue
divided by views.
So we filter that out.
- Wow! That's good to know about shorts.
I also heard that analytics for shorts,
I can't see typical performance for shorts and analytics.
Is that true?
And why can't I see a typical performance there?
- Yeah.
So, because shorts is kind of a very new format,
we wanted to make sure that we weren't really generating
any unfair comparison,
so we didn't want to say things like,
"Oh no, your average view duration has gone down."
If we're comparing it to regular videos,
'cause that won't,
it wouldn't be an apples to apples comparison.
So we've disabled
these sort of typical performance indicators,
the little up and down arrows,
and also some of the headlines for shorts
just to make sure that we actually
when we do really bring it back,
that it actually makes sense and is a fair comparison.
So we intend to have typical performance for shorts
but we want to do it properly.
- Okay. It makes sense.
So do you have any questions for CI audience today?
- Always. We're always working to improve analytics
and particularly for shorts because it's new,
we're very keen to hear you know
what would be the most interesting information for you?
What would be the most helpful?
So definitely leave us a comment
about that and we'll look into it.
- Awesome.
Well, thanks for coming to the show Fiona.
Leave your feedback under this video and keep it real.