Artists who operate YouTube channels are by now likely accustomed to YouTube’s Creator Studio, a service which will soon be unveiling a new design. Here we look at some of the new features which will be included in the update, and how you can make the most of them.
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By Jay Cook, Account Manager, Rights Management at The Orchard from their Daily Rind
If you run your own YouTube channels, you’re probably familiar with YouTube’s Creator Studio. This dashboard, which is really the heart of creator activities on YouTube, is where you may have uploaded videos, sought analytics and changed settings for your channel as a whole. In the upcoming weeks, YouTube is bringing a new design language to the Studio, and with it, some new features that can help you make the most of your business on YouTube.
The most immediately noticeable change is an update to the Creator Studio UI, including a new dashboard that will quickly display some of your top performing content and highlight important statistics. If you see a “YouTube Studio Beta” icon in your dashboard, you’re eligible to test it out now. If you prefer the old design, however, the option to switch back is available, and in the coming months YouTube will integrate the 3 new analytic metrics into the old view. Some sections, such as Live Streaming, will still be displayed in classic view until the features are developed in the new interface. You can access these through the “Missing Features” menu on the left side of your screen. But perhaps more importantly than the new look, YouTube is introducing three new metrics to help you expand your audience.
Analytics are at the core of your business on YouTube, and in the past we’ve covered the insights you could gain from sources such as real-time analytics, traffic sources, and subscriber-focused analytics. In the new update, YouTube is introducing three new metrics primarily focused on helping you understand how and where your audience is seeing your videos, whether they’re clicking through when they see your thumbnails, and just how many people are watching your videos. Like existing metrics, each of these can be applied on a video-by-video basis, to your entire channel, or to groups of videos to help you detect patterns and improve your content.
The first of the three new metrics is Impressions. An impression is counted as when someone is browsing YouTube and sees your thumbnail in search results, on the YouTube home page, in feeds such as “trending” and “subscriptions,” or in the “up next” feed that appears alongside a video. Impressions will not be counted if your thumbnail is more than 50% out of frame, only shown on screen for less than a second, displayed as an in-video card or end screen, or hyperlinked from an external website. Because of the amount of data being collected and filtered for accuracy here, YouTube advises that it make take a couple of days before an accurate measure of impressions appears for newly uploaded content. A low number of impressions can be a sign that you’re not using enough relevant tags and metadata to get your videos in the right results, while a high number indicates your content is optimized.
The next metric being introduced is Impression Click-Through Rate. As the name implies, this is measuring, in a percentage, how often viewers clicked through your thumbnails. Functionally, this is a great way to measure how effective your titles and thumbnails are at attracting viewers to watch your content. Try using custom thumbnails that stand out with a modern, professional look, and attention-grabbing titles that accurately sell the content of your video.
Finally, the last metric is Unique Viewers, which uses account and other data to track how many unique individual users are watching your videos, whether they’re watching on mobile, desktop, or watching multiple videos. This will help you get an idea of how much of your viewers are regulars who watch every videos, and give you a more holistic picture of how many different viewers are seeing your content.
Some of the questions these metrics could help you answer:
- Do I have regular viewers who aren’t subscribers?
- Do I have certain videos that are reaching more unique viewers than others?
- What content is getting the most impressions, and why?
- What thumbnails and titles are driving the least click-throughs?
- How big is my reach on YouTube?
Answering any of these questions can provide valuable insight that will help you develop your content strategy, and give you additional leverage when negotiating partnerships with other promoters. As these analytics roll out, give them a try and connect with your label manager if you have any questions on what you see. Keep an eye on The Daily Rind too, as we’ll be sure to update you on any more additions or adjustments YouTube makes to these new analytics over time.