If you want to grow your YouTube channel, it’s important to know what content your audience is interacting with the most. The Content tab in YouTube Studio Analytics has a chip for ‘Video’ that includes reports for how your videos are performing.
Content Tab in Analytics (Sort by Videos, Shorts, Live or Posts)
Key metrics
2 New Performance Metrics for Shorts! 📊🤳
The first report is the key metrics card, which shows the change in important metrics over time. The timeline includes publish dates for your videos if viewed on a computer. You can flip through the cards to see how your videos performed around publish dates and over time.
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Views |
Impressions |
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Definition: How many times your content was viewed. This is compared to your videos’ typical performance. |
Definition: How many times your video thumbnails were shown to viewers. Includes only impressions on YouTube, not on external sites or apps. |
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Insight: Over time, this metric can help you spot high-performing videos, anticipate seasonal changes, and decide when to upload new videos. |
Insight: This metric can help you understand the reach of your videos. |
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Impressions click-through rate
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Average view duration |
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Definition: How often viewers watched a video after seeing the thumbnail. |
Definition: The average minutes watched per view for the selected content, date range, country/ region, and other filters. |
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Insight: This metric helps indicate how appealing the thumbnail, title, and video content is to viewers. |
Insight: Over time, the amount of time that viewers watch your videos will help show changes in audience interests. |
Viewers across formats
Definition: The breakdown and overlap of returning viewers consuming your content by formats you publish (Videos, Shorts, and Live).
Insight: This breakdown can help you understand if viewers who return to your channel are watching a new format you publish and, more generally, if this audience watches multiple formats. This can help inform your content strategy.
Key moments for audience retention
Have you wondered how viewers choose to watch your video? Do they watch just the beginning, or do they watch until the end?
Retention can help answer these questions - it shows how long viewers choose to stay with your video, or how long your content captures their attention.
Intro
A typical intro is about 30 seconds long. From this card, you can observe how each of your video intros compares with the others. Videos that have 50% of the audience or more watching after the 30-second mark can be found in the ‘above typical intros’ list.
Click through each video to see its graph. The gray section of the chart is your typical retention. Typical retention is the engagement that the last 10 of your videos of a similar length have maintained. Comparing against your typical retention will show if that video is performing better than average.
A high intro percentage could mean:
- The start of your video kept the audience interested.
- The video matches audience’s expectations based on your thumbnail and title.
Recommendations to improve your intro percentage:
- Consider making your video thumbnail and title better reflect your video content.
- Edit the first 30 seconds of your video and experiment with different styles to find one that will keep your audience interested.
Top moments
Top moments are moments in your video where almost no one left the video while watching. Find and celebrate these moments!
Recommendations to increase top moments:
- If your top moments happen later in your video, consider introducing that content earlier in the video. Audience numbers tend to decrease as videos progress, so try to catch their attention earlier.
- Do you observe a pattern in the top moments? Consider creating new content by expanding on the content from your top moments.
Spikes
Spikes are moments in your video that were re-watched or shared. This could mean:
- Your audience watched that part more than the rest of the video because it caught their interest.
- Your content wasn’t clear and your audience had to rewatch a part.
Dips
Dips highlight moments in your video that were either skipped or moments where viewers stopped watching your video completely. Dips can mean that your audience watched that part less than other parts of the video.
How viewers find your videos
This report highlights where audiences are finding your content and how they are discovering your channel.
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Overall |
External |
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Of all sources, this lists the most popular. This includes places both external to and within YouTube. |
From outside YouTube, audiences may be finding you from internet searches, embeds in other sites, and so on. |
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YouTube search |
Suggested videos |
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This lists all the popular terms and words audiences used to find your content. |
Traffic from suggestions that appear next to or after other videos, and from links in video descriptions. |
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Playlists |
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Traffic from any playlist that included one of your videos. These playlists can be your own playlist or another creator's playlist. You can see specific playlists that drove traffic to your videos on the “Traffic source: Playlists” card of the Reach tab. |
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Looking through your traffic can help grow your channel:
- Find ideas for new content in the search terms viewers are using to find you.
- Which are the top sources for your channel, and what does that tell you about your audience? Example: If YouTube search is the highest, audiences are coming to YouTube to find you or expect to find content like yours on YouTube. In this case, what could you do to increase traffic from other avenues such as external sources?
Top videos
This is a list of your videos sorted by views.
- Do you see any patterns in which videos tend to be more popular?
- Do you notice changes in popular content at different times of the year?
The reports described here may vary from what you see in Studio. This is because Studio customizes reports for your channel based on your content.
Next: check out tips to learn what content to create