When diving into YouTube analytics, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of numbers and metrics. However, focusing on a few key indicators can make all the difference in shaping your content strategy.
Among these, five metrics stand out as crucial for understanding and improving your channel’s performance. These include Impression Click-Through Rate (CTR), Average Percentage Viewed, Average View Duration, Views, and Audience Retention.
Each of these metrics offers a unique insight into how well your videos are resonating with viewers and how they’re engaging with your content. By mastering these metrics, you can refine your approach, boost your visibility, and ultimately grow your channel more effectively.
Let’s break down why these metrics matter and how they can guide your YouTube strategy.
The five most important YouTube metrics and why they matter
You can make content on YouTube all you want, but the fact is that there are tenets you should look to adhere to if you want your content to fully reach your intended audience. Here are the five metrics that we believe will guide the average YouTuber to make strategy decisions.
Impression click-through rate
Before we dive in here, there two main concepts to keep in mind.
- A high CTR % should lead to more total impressions on YouTube
- More impressions doesn’t equal a better Impression click-through rate
Impression click-through rate is the percentage of impressions of your thumbnail that result in a click being made on your YouTube video. Have you ever heard the saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink”? Well if your thumbnail and title on your YouTube video aren’t great, you won’t be getting many impressions, and at that point, a higher CTR % is meaningless, because our goal is to get a large number of total impressions, while keeping a high CTR %.
This metric is very important and sort of kicks everything off because, without a good CTR, it doesn’t really matter whether your content is good or not. If people aren’t clicking through the content, nobody will see the content enough to judge whether it’s good.
Average Percentage Viewed
Everyone wants to see people watching their video, and each of the next three metrics deals with that. The percentage of your video that is being watched is referred to as average percentage viewed.
This metric is pretty simple. You want to aim for a very high percentage of your video viewed; the higher the better. Very few people are going to have their video watched from start to finish, which is why we recommend you aim for 75%, which is an elite number. 50% is a great area to be in, and 20% is pretty rough.You can see how this is expressed via the audience retention graph.
Average view duration
This is the average time that a viewer spends watching your video, and it goes hand-in-hand with the average percentage viewed metric. We use both average view duration and average percentage viewed to be able to compare videos that are different lengths.
For example, a 10 minute video with a 50% average percentage viewed, will have a significantly higher average view duration than a 5 minute video with the same average percentage viewed.
Views
Very simply, this metric details the total amount of views your video got.
This is a catchall metric encompassing the above three metrics.
What we mean by that is that if you have a good impression click-through rate, a solid average percentage viewed number, and a good average view duration, then you will get more views on your YouTube content.
Audience retention
The last of the five YouTube metrics that we recommend is less of a metric, ironically, and more of a visualization. It stands separately from the other four due to that fact, but is no less important.
By looking at an audience retention graph, you can see exactly where you need to make changes in your content, because it shows you where viewers drop off/spike. This can allow you to make the necessary adjustments to ensure that those viewers don’t leave your videos for that reason again.
Other YouTube metrics to pay attention to
Watch time
This is a comparative metric to views, because as you can probably guess, the watch time is the total amount of time users spent watching your video.
This is another catchall metric that encompasses average percentage viewed and average view duration, and if you have solid numbers in both categories, you’ll have a strong watch time number.
The reason this metric does not make our list of the five most important YouTube metrics is that the important elements of watch time are being captured with Average View Duration and Average Percentage Viewed. Also, the length of content on YouTube can vary so much from creator to creator, so we find using a percentage based metric to be more accurate.
Demographics and audience info
The demographics in the Audience tab of YouTube analytics is a very handy tool. It tells you which other creators and videos are being viewed by your audience.
In a digital media age where so much content is based off another piece of content, this can be very helpful if you are looking to shape your content in a certain way to get it viewed by more of your target audience.
Traffic sources
The Views by Traffic Source metric shows how viewers find and watch your video. It also lets you work to optimize those flows, telling you social, external, and of course, YouTube traffic.
You ideally want your traffic to mainly come from YouTube because that means the platform is working for you. Your video appearing in YouTube Recommended is also very important.
The metric ranks sources by impressions, views, average view duration, watch time, and impressions click-through rate.
While a large amount of external traffic means that you are good at driving traffic to your video through promotional efforts, there can also be risks in this, like your traffic coming from a social post but clicking off your video because they wanted to see a social post, not sit through a video. This can lead to you having a lower average percentage viewed and overall retention.
Card clicks
When you click on a card in a video, which is an interactive piece of content that a creator will place in their video for a viewer to click on and lead to a different video or a different website entirely, this is known as a card click.
You can also see cards in the end screens of videos, which obviously show up as the video is ending and usually feature other videos and places to visit the creator’s work.
Getting people to click on these is great, because it shows they want to interact with you even more, not just on your one video they’re watching. However, when you think about it, for someone to click on a traditional end screen card, they need to reach the actual end of your video, which a lot of people click off before the end.
This issue has led to some YouTubers adding traditional end screens with a few minutes remaining in a video. One tip is to take your average percentage viewed and line up end screens with that.
Engagement
The subject of engagement is double-sided. Engagement examples are likes, dislikes, comments, and shares; they’re how people interact with you on your videos.
Plenty of people view engagement as either positive or negative, in that people can “bomb” the dislike button on a video or spam comment your comment section, for example. This was minorly changed last year with YouTube hiding the dislike count on videos. However, all engagement still registers as engagement, and shows that people are interacting with your content.
Even if you ignore the built-in engagement metrics on YouTube, generally speaking, you want to make content that has people engaging with it, because it’s one of the best ways to build connection and community.
Subscriber growth on specific videos
It can be disconcerting for a creator to see that one video has resulted in massive growth to their channel, while their next one doesn’t result in much growth at all. They’ll feel they did something wrong, or weren’t entertaining enough.
While that may be true in some cases, some videos just don’t lead to growth. Not all videos need to acquire subscribers, although it’s obviously not a bad thing if they do. Even if a video doesn’t lead to subscriber growth, as long as it provides value to current subscribers and provides enjoyment, then it’s good.
Figuring out what the traits are of the videos that do drive notable subscription growth is key and can be extremely helpful in your planning efforts to grow your channel.
YouTube metrics that we question the importance of
Just as there are plenty of metrics on YouTube that you can pay attention to that will help grow your channel, there are some that we view just don’t help in the long run and you can prioritize less, if at all.
Keywords
Keywords are always an interesting topic because there are arguments on both sides for their usefulness. However, we question tracking keywords as a YouTube metric because of how video-specific it can be.
Let’s use two Mr. Beast videos as an example: his viral Squid Game recreation video and his nuclear bunker survival to win 500k video.
Mr. Beast released the Squid Game video after everyone was binge-watching the series on Netflix, obviously a terrific marketing move to capitalize on the popularity. It likely has many keywords relating to Squid Game, which helped as well to drive traffic.
On the other side of things, the nuclear bunker survival video (which I actually watched from start to finish and thoroughly enjoyed) likely doesn’t have as many keywords. It’s not an idea attached to a viral trend, as I assure you many people are not freely volunteering to spend 3 months in a nuclear bunker with no sunlight. However, it’s a cool concept that people wanted to see, which drove the popularity of the video.
You don’t NEED keywords to have a viral video! Make sure that you find a balance between the two concepts here.
Rewatches
Some content is better suited for rewatches. Maybe it’s a cooking recipe that you wanted to watch someone make, or an instruction guide on how to change a tire. Children’s content also tends to get rewatched a lot.
On the other hand, live content tends to not be rewatched. For example, someone who posted a video breaking down their golf bets on the Masters Tournament is probably only going to have a shelf life of the time between the posting of that video and when the Masters starts.
We want to keep coming back to metrics that we can count on to be balanced and consistent across video topic and niche.
The Unique Viewers metric works similarly to this in that it aims to determine the number of people who have watched your videos at least once. If one person comes back ten times to watch that video, the view counter will increase by ten, but the Unique Viewers will count it as one.
Playlist engagement
We don’t love playlist engagement because it only captures a portion of your viewership data in that it only looks at viewership numbers that come directly from watching a playlist.
Most viewers do not watch playlists as opposed to singular videos, and some channels are better suited for having large amounts of playlists, while others are not.
Creator metrics vs Agency/Business KPIs
It’s sometimes hard to remember that despite this era being intensely focused on the rise of creator-led media, with streamers and content creators on their own commanding massive channels, that YouTube is also home to agencies and businesses creating content as well.
Creators use YouTube metrics in order to make better content and inform themselves of what their audience is looking to see. On the other hand, agencies and businesses use KPIs, or key performance indicators, to tie overall YouTube performance to business objectives.
Neither one of these approaches are wrong, but they can be at odds with one another and need to be balanced. For example, some people would say that a view is not a KPI when it comes to YouTube, and a better metric would be Watch Time, but in reality, you cannot accumulate watch time without acquiring the view in the first place.
If you focus on the metrics that we’ve covered in depth in this piece that lead you to good content and YouTube success, then concern of capturing a view without accumulating watch time should be alleviated.
At the end of the day, if business KPIs impact a creator’s ability to make good content, or a creator cannot fulfill his business KPIs, then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The two need to work in concert together.
Final Thoughts
In the ever-evolving landscape of YouTube, focusing on the right metrics is essential for channel growth and success. By prioritizing five key metrics—Impression Click-Through Rate, Average Percentage Viewed, Average View Duration, Views, and Audience Retention—you can gain a clear understanding of how your content performs and how to optimize it for better results.
These metrics offer valuable insights into viewer engagement and content effectiveness, helping you make informed decisions and refine your strategy. While other metrics like watch time, traffic sources, and engagement are also important, these five provide a solid foundation for evaluating and improving your channel’s performance. Balancing creator insights with business KPIs ensures that your content not only resonates with viewers but also meets broader objectives.
Keep these metrics in mind, and you’ll be well on your way to creating successful, impactful YouTube content.
