If you’re only looking at your views to judge your YouTube success, you’re missing out. YouTube boasts a great analytics dashboard, and there are lots of YouTube metrics to explore. Below, we discuss six factors you should be looking at to improve your YouTube success.
Views
Views are the most obvious way to see if your videos are successful because that’s the whole point: eyeballs on your video. You can track views in a few ways:
- You can simply keep track of your Lifetime views, and record it monthly with the rest of your social media key metrics.
- YouTube has a great interactive views graph that you can play with. Notice where the spikes are and if they correspond to the release of a video. If so, note that that video was important and try to figure out why (more on this below).
- If you post on a regular schedule (weekly, every second Tuesday, etc.), try creating a spreadsheet and recording how many views each video gets after a set amount of time (3 days or 1 week after posting, for example). Keep in mind that the period between posting and recording results has to be consistent for your results to be meaningful. This will let you see if each video is getting views more quickly than your last video, which can indicate whether people are more eager to get their hands on your content.
This video has a nice upward trend of views, which indicates more people are watching this channel over time.
Subscribers
- You can keep track of your overall subscribers in a very similar way as your Lifetime views. Just track their growth over time, much like you would with Twitter or Facebook followers.
- Another way to look at this measurement is to track how many subscribers you gained and lost in a specific period. If you are gaining more than you’re losing, you’re on the right track. But, if you lose an unusual amount at once, or gain an unusual amount at once, check what you’ve been posting, and check for possible explanations.
Drop-off Point
This metric is found under Audience Retention and tells you when people stopped watching your video and clicked away.
Ideally, what you’re looking for is a nice straight line as close to the 100% mark as possible. This would indicate that 100% of your audience watched your video all the way through. Of course, you’re more likely to see a gradual decline, but you want to avoid any sharp drop offs, or dipping below 50%. You can also look at the “relative audience retention” to see how your retention compares to other people’s videos on YouTube of similar length.
This video has good retention. People only start dropping off in the final seconds during the credits. Also, it retains over 65% of the audience until that point.
If the majority of your viewers are abandoning your video at a certain point, look at what happens at that moment in your video. The usual culprit is that it’s just too long. People have short attention spans. So, how long is too long? Well, if you are still providing valuable, engaging content, your video can be as long as you want. But the retention rates on your video will tell you if you’re doing that. Compare several videos and see where the average drop-off is, and that will give you a ballpark for how long to aim for with your subsequent videos.
Another factor that can cause a drop-off is your content. Did you have a technical issue while recording and your sound levels get too quiet at the drop-off point? Did you start going on a tangent and get off topic? Did you switch topics all together? Check several of your videos and look for factors that might have triggered someone to click away.
Likes, Dislikes, and Favourites
This one is pretty simple: check out which videos had a lot of favorites and which didn’t. Compare and try to figure out why.
You can also look at your likes to dislikes ratio. For example:
- Video A has 100 likes and 50 dislikes. That’s a 2:1 ratio.
- Video B has 400 likes and 100 dislikes. That’s a 4:1 ratio.
Although Video B has more dislikes, it’s actually a better rated video because a 4:1 ratio beats a 2:1 ratio.
Comments
As with every social platform, engagement is the most important thing to pay attention to. For example, what’s the point of having thousands of Twitter followers if no one ever retweets you? Same thing with YouTube: just having views is one thing, but comments show if you’re connecting with your viewers.
The comments-to-views ratio is a great way to track your engagement. If your video has 1000 views and five comments, you have a 200:1 ratio. Over time, you will want to try to lower that ratio. So, maybe you aim for a 10:1 ratio, or 10 comments on a video with 1000 views. You can do this for individual videos, or for your channel as a whole.
Shares
This is a very cool thing to check out: You can see which videos are being shared via social media. This is important because sharing is one of the best forms of engagement you can get from your audience; a like is passive and only takes a second, a comment shows more interest as your commenter has to take time out of their day to write something, but a share means they find your content interesting enough to endorse you by sharing with their friends. That’s a big deal.
YouTube also allows you to see which platforms your videos are being shared on, which can help you make decisions about which platforms might be best for you to spend your time cross-promoting your videos on.
Shares also indicate which of your videos is the most “viral” and, of course, the holy grail for every YouTuber is to hit upon the “How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking” viral level.
What Made My Video Popular?
Throughout this article, we’ve suggested you “compare your videos.” Here are some things to compare when you’re looking for what might have made a difference to your views, comments, likes, and all the other factors outlined above:
- Video length
- Title (Was it clear or mysterious? Did it make sense or was it wacky? Did it reference a timely issue)
- Preview thumbnail (Did the girl-in-bikini thumbnail do better than the picture of your cat?)
- Content (Do your tutorials get more views than your shopping haul videos? Do your posts on a controversial issue do better than your funny, light posts?)
- Production value (This means things like lighting, sound quality, etc.)
- Time of Day and Day of Week you posted
- Amount of promotion (did you put money behind promoting that video? Was it the first one you ever cross-promoted on Pinterest?)
In conclusion, there are many other metrics to track in YouTube than just views and subscribers. Dig into YouTube’s analytics offerings, and check out audience retention and shares. Also, try doing a bit of math and looking at ratios of comments to views.
Happy YouTubing!
