As a YouTube influencer, it’s really important that you know your numbers.
If you don’t know how many people are watching you and which content do they go back to…how do you plan to learn and improve? You can cringe and avoid looking at your metrics all you want, but the truth is, understanding your stats will help you and your YouTube channel a lot.
Looking at your channel through its statistics will make you see clearly which content is successful and why. This can and should influence the way you think about new video ideas, which games are you going to play and what kind of content are you going to actively promote. Numbers are your friends, so get to know yours well.
If you are wondering where to start, here are some websites that will help you visualize where your YouTube channel is at the moment and how to get it where you want it to be.
Social Blade is one of the biggest and most established stat pages out there. They have all of your basic channel info presented in a really great way — you can see the trends in subscribers and views straight away. Your views and subscriber count is listed day by day, so you can pick up on your content performance on weekends and weekdays.
They show you if your channel is growing and by how much at first glance, just look out for tiny green/red arrows next to your metrics. They even go as far as preparing a future projection for you! While this may not be 100% accurate (because no one can guarantee your channel growth), it gives you a general heads up on what will happen to your channel if you continue doing what you’re doing.
So after looking at your projection, are you on track with your growth or do you need to revamp the content you are putting out there?
StatSheep works in a very similar way to Social Blade. It takes the stats from your channel and gives you a really nice overview of where you are and where is your channel heading. The one thing that makes this website special is that you can directly compare your channel to others.
If you click on the ‘Compare’ button at the top of the page it will tell you to enter the handles of two different channels that you’d like to see alongside each other. It will take the basic statistics off them and show you who is doing better in a few different aspects like the number of views and subscribers.
This feature can be handy if you know a few people with channels of similar size that create content like yours and you would like to see who is performing better. If you know who gets better numbers you can try and find out why — is their audience different? Do they network? How do they engage with their communities? It’s a piece of really useful knowledge if you want to grow your channel, so don’t miss out on it.
Kedoo is another website that will show you your core stats in a clean, easy to understand way. They have all the basics that allow you to see your long-term YouTube channel performance, and they have a few small features that make them worth checking out.
One of those features is that they track your subscribers in real-time, which is great if you want to do a quick check on how your latest video is doing on the go. This could be especially handy if you are on holiday or taking a break and don’t have access to your laptop — just grab your mobile and see everything for yourself.
Great little addition is the tab at the very bottom of their page featuring similar channels. You can check out the competition, see what everyone else is doing with their content and pick up on trends that affect the whole YouTube gaming category. This way you can also discover and make new YouTube friends — there’s never enough networking going around!
Last but not least, your channel stats page can give you a quite good understanding of what is happening with your content, where are the views coming from and what is currently trending.
Your analytics page should be the first place you check for basic information about your channel and content. You can learn a lot from it, but it may be a bit overwhelming with the amount of information available and the way in which it’s presented.
The most important things to look out for are:
– Top videos and their watch time
– Average view duration
– Traffic sources
What kind of videos click with your audience? After checking out your top videos you should know if there’s a type of content that is more popular than others. Maybe you are amazing at putting together top 10 lists or walkthroughs — if so, go and make more! Your audience is clearly interested in this type of content.
Do people watch your videos in full? Or do they only stay for the commentary in the middle and skim the rest? Ideally, you’d create the type of content that would make people watch the whole thing. If your community loses interest in the middle of your video ask yourself why and try to fix it.
How are your viewers finding you? Is it because of the networking that you do or maybe you happen to create videos that are useful for people and they search for it? Answering this question will help you understand how your content is discovered on YouTube and how to make it more effective.
If in doubt — always check your analytics and try to understand what is happening and why. This is a great base to learn about your content’s performance and the more you know about it the better.
There are services out there like Unfollow.io that allow you to check who dropped out from your channel. The service is in Beta, so there may be some hiccups, but it’s worth a look.
As much as you shouldn’t obsess about every single person who decided to unsubscribe from you, it is important to know if there’s a tendency behind it. A single person clicking the ‘Unsubscribe’ button doesn’t mean much. People get bored, move on, their taste changes all the time. Or they simply get banned from the site and their account disappears forever. However, if there’s a huge wave of people ditching your channel after a video you uploaded earlier in the day it’s a clear message that this type of content doesn’t sit well with your audience. In that case, you may want to quickly find out what went wrong in the first place and adjust your content strategy.
Not every statistics website out there needs to be 100% about your channel and your channel only. Socialbakers, for example, aims to show you the general trends on YouTube by industry and country.
What is the hottest game by an audience in the UK? What kind of gaming channels are people watching in India? Which top channels have the best subscriber/video view ratio?
Because of how broad it is, it may not seem like a great tool at first. But if you think about the possibilities it may just click with you. If you can find out what kind of content works for bigger channels maybe you could produce a better version of it yourself. Or if you find a brand that has great engagement maybe you can learn a thing or two from them.
If you decide to use any of the websites above do yourself a favor and remember one thing — don’t overthink it. Use the numbers they give you as a tool to make your channel better. Look for trends. Find out what your community wants. Fix mistakes that you made along the way. Learn and improve as you go and you are going to be better than ever before. Why? Because now you have full access to the information you never knew you need before.
Go look at your stats and learn all you can from them. Good luck!