This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "YouTube Secrets" by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How do you know your videos are really delivering the value you intended? Do YouTube analytics overwhelm you?
If you want to have a successful YouTube channel, you need to understand the metrics for your videos. In YouTube Secrets, prominent YouTubers Benji Travis and Sean Cannell help you decipher YouTube’s algorithms and leverage them for ranking.
Keep reading to learn how to understand YouTube analytics and make use of their insights.
How to Understand YouTube Analytics
In addition to keeping an eye on the subjective feedback you get from your viewers, Travis and Cannell say you need to know how to understand YouTube analytics. They identify a few key metrics that can help you assess how viewers are reacting to your videos and channel. (You can access these metrics from the “Analytics” tab of your channel’s “Studio” page.) They assert that these metrics are also the ones that most affect how YouTube’s algorithms will rank your videos in search results and recommendations, so you want these metrics to be as high as possible.
CTR stands for “click-through rate.” It represents how often users click on your video when they see the video thumbnail. To maximize this, make sure your video title and thumbnail image clearly identify the value viewers can expect to get from the video.
AVD stands for “average view duration.” It’s the average amount of time viewers spend watching a given video before browsing to something else. The time that a viewer is willing to spend on a given video is a good measure of how engaging they find that video. Following the authors’ advice on how to make videos should help to make your videos engaging.
APV stands for “average percentage viewed.” This is the same as average view duration, except that it’s expressed as a percentage of the video’s length instead of the amount of time spent watching it.
AVPV stands for “average views per viewer.” It’s the average number of videos on your channel that someone watches in a row before going to another channel. How many of your videos people watch in a row provides a measure of how well your channel is engaging your audience, and how much they’re likely to want more of your content when they discover you. Maximizing this metric is one of the reasons the authors recommend ending each of your videos by recommending another video, as we discussed earlier.
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Here's what you'll find in our full YouTube Secrets summary:
- A guide to developing a successful YouTube business model
- How to produce videos and grow your audience
- How to find and implement the most effective revenue streams
