Are you actively maintaining your own channel on YouTube? If yes, then you must be regularly trying to figure out how well your video content is doing; how many new subscribers you were able to add; and how many views each of your videos got; isn’t it? Of course, it is only a by-product of the general curiosity and the constant thriving for success! Maintaining your own YouTube channel is no child’s play and requires a significant amount of effort, dedication, resources, and most of all – creativity. You want to create a space for yourself in the online world with the content you upload, gather a decent level of popularity, and perform well enough so as to start monetizing from it.
This is where your channel insights come in handy. You must always keep a close eye on the numbers revolving around your YouTube channels and the videos you upload. These numbers will give you an exact idea of how good or bad you are doing individually, as well as how well or worse you fare in comparison to other people running similar channels on YouTube – your competition. There is a dedicated insights page for your YouTube channel, it shows a lot of data broken down and categorized into simplified charts and graphs for an easy inference – the YouTube Studio. Open the YouTube Studio page from your channel’s home page; you’ll land on the Studio’s dashboard. The dashboard gives you a summary of the data you need to know about your channel.
Interpreting the Data
- Current Subscribers – the exact number of people who have subscribed to your channel. Your subscribers are notified as soon as any new video has been uploaded on your channel. These people are following your channel!
- Watch Time – this is basically the aggregate time in minutes that was spent on viewing the videos on your channel. The higher the watch time, the better it is!
- Average View Duration – this statistic tells you the average duration for which your videos were played by viewers. Say you have uploaded 5 videos, with a length or duration of 5 minutes each; and your average video duration is coming out to be 2:30 (two minutes and thirty seconds) – it is suggestive of the fact that people are not watching your videos till the end. They are probably getting bored or not liking the content enough to watch it to its entirety. It is probably a good idea to tweak your content a bit!
- Impressions – this is aggregate number of times your video’s thumbnail was shown to people. Simply put, impressions mean the number of times your video had a chance of being watched.
- Click Through Rate – this is the statistic that tells you how many times were you able to make a rather successful impression. Your CTR should be as high as it can get! It speaks about how smartly your thumbnails have lured people into viewing the videos.
- Views – this is the aggregate number of times your videos have been watched by people. You can check the aggregate views for all videos or the views for one particular video individually.
- Unique Viewers – this explains that out of the so many views, how many of them were watched by unique people. For instance, the total views on 1 video are 200 and unique viewers are 90 – this means that your video was watched by ninety guys for about two hundred times (some of them watched it repeatedly)
These are the basic insight metrics for any YouTube video or channel. There are many other metrics on the offer and you can even apply filters using date ranges.
If you are looking to compare your channel’s performance to another channel(s), there are many independent websites to help you with it. Try a search with the keywords ‘YouTube Channel Compare’ and open up any website. You can simply feed in the YouTube URLs for the channels you want to compare and the web-apps do the rest for you. They will show you a real-time comparison of your subscribers, CTRs, views, etc. so that you can figure out if your channel is ahead or losing out to competition.
