As you continue to create content and grow your audience, you might be asking yourself , "How is my channel doing?" “Am I on the right track?” “What is the benchmark for good performance?” This involves looking beyond individual video performance to understand the big picture of your channel's reach and audience engagement over time.
What is the most important metric to optimize for?
The reality is there's no single most important metric to optimize for. All metrics can help you understand your audience’s preferences. Similarly, there's no universal "good" benchmark for performance metrics like click-through rate (CTR), as what's considered good varies wildly across content topics and formats. Instead, content is ranked against other videos a viewer might want to watch. So, when you're looking to improve, optimize against your own historical metrics rather than aiming for an external benchmark.
Define your own growth. Your goals, business aspirations, and strategy should determine what success looks like. For some, growth might mean more views and watch time, while for others, it could be an increase in revenue. By setting your own targets, you can use analytics to measure what truly matters to you.
Look for a Steady Stream of Views
A steady or growing view trend over time (for example, 90 days) is the most immediate indicator of your channel's overall reach and content appeal, it indicates that your content is consistently being discovered by a wide audience.
- Zoom out: Analyzing your channel with different time frames is key for a complete understanding of its performance. Zooming out at least 90 days gives you a broader perspective, revealing trends and the overall trajectory of your channel's growth.
- Channel growth isn't always linear: Compare this data to past periods, you can use year-over-year comparisons to identify seasonal trends and better understand whether a recent dip or spike is part of a recurring pattern.
The Overview page in Analytics pairs your views or watch time with a timeline of your published videos.
- Monitor your upload schedule impact: You’ll often see that publishing new videos is correlated with a growth in views, as each video can serve as a new entry point for a viewer to discover your channel. Using this data can help you understand how your publishing schedule affects your channel's overall performance.
Look for a Steady Stream of Viewers
To have sustained growth on your channel, it’s important to attract new viewers while also nurturing its existing audience.
The new, casual, and regular viewers data within the Audience tab gives you more granular segmentation on viewer behavior. This variety of viewers is crucial for growing your channel and building a loyal community.
- New viewers are important for expanding your reach and introducing your content to a wider audience.
- Casual viewers are people who have watched your content before but are not regular viewers. They are still a critical group to nurture and convert into loyal fans.
- Regular viewers are a sign that your content is resonating deeply, helping to build a loyal community.
Check out more tips on how to build loyalty with new, casual and regular viewers.
Subscribers ≠ viewers: Your subscriber count isn't always the same as your active audience. Subscriber count reflects how many people have hit the 'subscribe' button, but it doesn't indicate if they are still watching. For a more accurate measure of your active audience, look at your monthly audience or unique viewers.
Next: Check out more tips to dive into video performance using content tab analytics.