Despite the fact I constantly say, “Stop staring at your analytics” doesn’t mean
you will!
I know you are obsessed with looking at them, ya filthy little bugger, how do I know this?
Because I am too… today I am going to cover the MOST important analytics you should check
if you want to determine if a stream was successful, if you are on the right track for growth,
and including the most important analytic on all of Twitch … that you can’t even
see on Twitch analytics. Let’s go!
Hey! I’m Eljay, with Streamscheme.com and I am also a variety streamer over at Twitch.tv/eljayem_
links to both of those in the description.
Straight out of the gate I want to mention I am hosting a HUGE charity stream at the
end of this month, we are going to be giving away over $2000 worth of Streamer prizes that
I know you guys will love!. If you want more information, it will be on my Twitch, the
Stream Scheme Discord, and on Twitter! All linked in the description, go click those
so you don’t miss the giveaway!
Today I want to break down the most important analytics you need to check in your stream
in order to make sure you are growing in a sustainable way, and how to tell what content
is working, I’ll also be lifting up my skirt and flashing my own stats for you, while also
breaking down ways to engage people better, analyse your content with these stats, and
cover the most important analytics you can possible look at for streaming. If this analytic
is down, then you are in big trouble, that is coming up soon but first
I want to let you guys know about our sponsor, Own3d.tv! Who may or may not have given us
some stuff for said giveaway, the absolute legends!
They support this channel a lot guys and the team over there are fantastic, Own3d are your
one-stop-shop for stream resources, whether you're looking for a full stream package,
emotes, sound alerts, or anything else you might need, they have it.
We have a link in the description so if you go click that and check out what they've got,
you might find your new stream overlay pack!
Massive thank you to own3d for supporting the channel as well, so if you want to support
me, go support them! It really helps us out!
Also in the description, you guys know what I am going to say, there are timecodes down
there so if you want to jump ahead to any segment, but let’s just get into it.
Before we get into the wildly important analytics you should be BUT AREN’T checking, we have
to cover the most crucial one… Revenue….. I am kidding obviosuly, revenue isn’t a
sign of growth… and shouldn’t be a focus... let’s look at average viewers because I
know it is the one you guys care most about…. If we don’t include revenue! Often people
look at average viewers for an entire stream, and this is okay but like most of what we
will look at today there is a much better way to look at it.
So First let’s look at a stream by stream basis, average viewers can be used to gauge
interest in the content you are making, are people getting bored of the same stuff and
leaving, did you make a big category change or style change and people left?
Or did you make a big change and your viewers starting growing? You see creators who average
200 viewers for years, and then make a change in their content then explode but at the same
time you see people streaming 1 game for a long time
and then change to lose all their viewers.
You can use changes in average to determine the overall health of your streams growth
BUT you can also use it to improve individual streams by looking at your individual graphs!
If we look at my Average Viewer graph for my Dark Souls stream recently you can learn
a lot, we get a little peak here at the start as people click the go-lives from discord
and Twitch, a few people leave when they hear what we are doing that day but then the longer
I go more people join, this is a very healthy stream graph.
You can see here though at around 10:00PM my time, I have hit a peak for what I’ll
get in a dark souls stream and in fact you can see it starting to dip slightly as people
leave or get busy, UNTIL the Americans wake up, kick the door down, and blast in like
they’re looking for oil! Because of Youtube, I have a lot of followers from American timezone
so they usually give me a big boost here when they wake up.
If we ignore the American audience on mine, when you start seeing this dip it is usually
a good sign that the stream is in lurk mode and getting to about where the stream either
needs to end before viewers start leaving OR a big engagement tool needs to be used
to get them back into it but that depends on your engagement graphs which we will cover
soon!
Actionable Tip: Review what content has worked for you, and double down on that in order
to continue to grow. If you see large spikes or dips, review those sections of your VoD
to see why that might’ve happened. Adjust your content if needed! Don’t check your
average viewers while live either, if it is low you’ll get freaked out, if it is high
you might also get freaked out! If you want to review, do it after, and do it positively
so you can take steps forward.
Speaking of engagements! Let’s talk followers, because when I polled you guys you actually
said Followers didn’t matter to you when you were checking if a stream was healthy
which I am so happy about!
Followers are a bad engagement metric for determining growth because you don’t really
have a guarantee they’ll come back, I personally think there are much better engagement analytics
which I will cover soon! But I do have to cover how to use follower analytics, personally
I do look at followers gained but I look at it from a perspective of, “What type of
content did this person follow for”
The way my streams are set up is that I spend an hour or two doing Just Chatting segments
with Tier lists, stupid quizzes, or react content and then I shift into a game. If I
look back at my streams and check when my followers came in using the graphs I showed
earlier, I can see I got 51 new followers for a stream but in the first hour I got 28
new followers, and then in the next 3 hours I only got 22 new followers while playing
Pokemon Snap, which sounds fine right? Until you break it down that means I received 28
followers per hour in Just Chatting compared to 7.2 per hour in Snap.
So I should make sure I continue to tailor my content to have Just Chatting at the start
of my streams.
I also use this to determine the types of games people found me through, for example
I had 16 followers per hour with Valheim, with 57.5 hours in the game that is roughly
925 followers for that content and category.
Actionable tip: Pay attention to why people are following you, and tailor to your audience.
The same way I tell people to stick to a niche on Youtube, with Twitch people won’t come
back if the content they followed for changes the next night before they have become a member
of the streams community.
Just briefly I see a lot of creators looking at this “Previous Stream” or “last stream”
comparison, and being really let down when it has dipped but that isn't the right section
to look at. You can’t pick individual streams out and assume the stream is dying, this is
just helpful to look at if you made a big change between nights.
You should look for longer term trends usually, if you check your Channel Analytics and set
it to week by week, you’ll get a better understanding of your channels long term trajectory,
if you want to see if certain days perform better select just 7 days and go day by day
as well.
Be very careful with your analytics, don’t stare and obsess, look for trends and positive
movements then try to focus in on what worked, for example the metric I care most about and
SO MUCH more than followers is unique chatters and I saw that start to dip, so I made changes
based on previous successful weeks and it has been picked back up! Let me show you!
If you are like me and your content has a heavy focus on Chat Engagement, then you’ll
care a lot about Unique Chatters. Tracking your total unique chatters for a single stream
is great to see engagements during that stream but the most powerful way is to, you guessed
it! Check the graphs!
Usually a streams unique chatters will start VERY high with a big Go-live, hellos, greetings,
and the chatting segment at the start, from there most creators will see it dip down as
the stream continues because people start lurking or have you on in the background BUT
there are ways to keep people engaged, you just have to be very active, incorporate them
into the content some how with character names, questions, decision making, or even just with
commands,
Which if we look at this stream here for me you’ll see I went live with my chatting
segment, and it was very active and then it slowly dips off BUT you’ll see these big
spikes are people tabbing back in to join in on heists, a fun chat command based game
we have.
Actionable Tip: Review your average viewers alongside unique chatters so you can see what
content was engaging for the viewer interacting and what was engaging for people to simply
watch, if viewers doesn’t drop but unique chatters does then you can see people were
still there enjoying the content in a different way BUT I can show you better on our next
stat!
BUT FIRST I want to throw it out there, if this video helped you out at all, if you like
this channel, consider checking out our other content on growth tactics, setting up webcams,
emotes, you name it we have it all on the channel, if you like those then consider subscribing
or dropping a like!
If you do want to meet some other creators who are all taking this journey together,
get some inspiration, or even just see that you aren’t alone, click the discord link
in the description, make some friends and download our free overlays and stinger transitions!
More overlays coming out soon as well, so subscribe to the channel if you want to be
the first to get out brand new animated overlays!
So as I said unique chatters is great to see individuals being engaged and coming out of
lurking for example, but if you want to check overall Retention rates and how engaged people
actually are then I recommend using chat messages, both total
and graphed.
The Total messagel shows the overall engagement of the people who were in your stream, but
graphed will really help show you when people were really engaged in small segments. This
tends to line up with uniques, but if you see a big spike in uniques but no big spike
in total messages then it means you engaged them for a second or two, but then they went
back to lurking.
Both these graphs are from the same stream and you can really see that while my uniques
didn’t drastically fall, my chat messages per 5 minutes dropped heavily during this
Pokemon Platinum stream compared to the Chatting Segment at the start of the stream.
This tells me that if I want a more active chat during gaming, then I need to make more
reasons for people to engage in chat during Pokemon.
That said, almost any gaming content like this will see these dips across 3 - 4 hours,
it is simply natural the longer you go the more people tend to lurk without engagement
tactics.
Actionable Tip: Look at why people become active in certain segments, and adjust your
content to utilise those segments better to keep people engaged, don’t forget some content
just performs better for engagement than other content though.
We are almost at the most important analytic of the entire video but first let’s talk
about Go-livesI
I need to do a whole video about go-lives soon because I have spent 3 months now testing
Go-lives.
The takeaway here is your Go-live needs to appeal to the person receiving it, but also
engage them to take the action of clicking. Similar to titles this can be done with a
statement worth debating, like “Pineapple Belongs On Pizza! Come Find Out!” or you
can post something clickbait such as, “Buying A $280 MILLION Mansion With Chat!”
These were two that worked VERY well for me, BUT that is because as we saw I gain 27 followers
per hour on Just Chatting…. If ALL of your followers are from a certain category, you
should try to appeal to what they want to see.
You have to also think about retention rates because if someone arrives for content like
the Mansion but then you’re just playing a game they’ll leave, but if they arrive
and you are watching a mansion tour, poking fun at rich people having awful taste, it
will keep them retained because they clicked for that.
On the topic of retention rate, I did a go live that netted me 282 clicks and a huge
amount of chatters, but a chunk of them did leave after the first hour HOWEVER my overall
stats for the rest of the stream DID perform better because a lot of those 282 did stick
around, full video breaking that down soon so subscribe!
You can also use “Big Announcement!” or Hype events like “Reached 10k Followers”
or “I Got Twitch Partner!” to boost clicks as well but doing this too often does lower
the click-through, because people get bored of you hyping EVERYTHING up, so be sparing.
Sometimes dips in clicks aren’t because of content changes though, for example I pushed
heavily for people to join my discord, I saw a few hundred new members and then my go lives
on Twitch dipped to 60 clicks instead of 120 clicks, but my stats didn’t dip at all because
they were still coming to stream from the go-live in discord. This is confirmed across
multiple Twitch partners as well.
Actionable TIp: If you try a Go-live and it works in the analytics here, then consider
why it worked, and double down on that content. Think about how your followers are going to
see the Go-live and why they would click it.
So what is the most important analytic you need to remember for your stream? You won’t
find it in your Twitch Analytics, on Sullygnome, twitchtracker, or anywhere else.
Because the most important analytic is, how much are you enjoying streaming, and how much
your community is enjoying your stream.
If all your stats say you are growing but you hate the content, you’re bored, miserable,
or the concept of hitting the Go-Live button is stressing you out then the stats are wrong,
and you have to change something even if you lose viewers...
Streaming is meant to be enjoyable, you should be happy when you are doing it, and aggressively
analysing your stats won’t help that. As a streamer you need to settle on the fact
that what you love might not be what is best for growth, but if you want this to be long
term and a real career, you need to find a balance between growth and burn out.
Before this Youtube channel was a thing, I was getting massive followers a stream by
playing Minecraft, 100 - 125 is what I get in a WHOLE day with the Youtube channel currently,
but playing Minecraft I was getting 45 - 50 new followers in the space of 3 hour streams.
I could be at double the followers right now, and triple the chatters if I was still playing
Hardcore Minecraft but I would probably not still be Streaming or at least I wouldn’t
be enjoying it because that just wasn’t for me and it wasn’t the community I wanted.
As for if your community is enjoying the content, you can gauge this from chatters, chat messages,
follows, and a really good one how many clips they made and published using the clip graph
but at the end of the day, you can tell if your community likes it pretty easily.
So my final actionable tip: Make sure you are always balancing out what you enjoy vs
what you are doing to grow. Think long term growth and enjoyment before short term gains.