Thread by @AliAbdaal

When you’ve got a solid set of data, YouTube Studio gets complicated pretty quickly.

There’s so much to look at and it’s so easy to get obsessed with the numbers.

But I’ve found only three metrics really matter 👇

I’ve worked with a handful of YouTube coaches over the last couple of years but everything always really comes back to the same three metrics:

📱 Click-Through Rate

🗺️ Audience Retention

😄 Returning + Unique Viewers

1 - 📱 Click-Through Rate (CTR)
YouTube measures the % of clicks that come from the YouTube homepage, recommendation section or trending section.

This is THE metric to watch to see whether your title and thumbnail are performing well (and we all know how important titles and thumbnails are)

A high CTR means:

✏️ The title + thumbnail were compelling enough

💭 The topic resonated with the audience

A low CTR means:
🔧  We need to update the title and/or thumbnail

But CTR just tells you whether you’ve earned the click.

You should also compare it against other metrics like 'average percentage viewed' and 'average view duration'. This’ll tell you how engaged your audience is after they click.

A low CTR but a high watch time could mean the video is interesting but the thumbnail sucks.

It’s pretty likely your first title/thumbnail combo won’t be the best so you should also try to A/B test titles and thumbnails all the time.

I’ve always got at least 20 A/B tests just constantly running on @tubebuddy so we’re optimising everything.

@TubeBuddy 2 - 🗺️  Audience Retention

YouTube rewards content with a high view duration - which basically means if people are watching a good portion of your video, it'll be pushed out to more people in search rankings and suggestions.

@TubeBuddy You can analyse audience retention under the engagement tab. From here, you can figure out where viewers started to trail off or if there are parts that are rewatched.

This is really cool and can help you improve your scripting or give you video ideas for the future.

@TubeBuddy MrBeast even cuts out parts of his videos where he’s seen the audience dropping off.

Seems a bit extreme but it’s how he optimises everything and probably why he’s got 90 million subs lol

@TubeBuddy 3 - 😄 Returning + Unique Viewers

Checking the amount of ‘returning viewers’ coming back to your channel is important - it shows whether or not you’re growing an engaged audience.

@TubeBuddy ‘Unique viewers’ are the exact opposite - new viewers who are visiting your channel for the first time.

@TubeBuddy It's worth analysing both to understand the actual size of the audience.

Ideally, you want a 60/40 split, leaning towards unique viewers. This is a good indication that your audience is growing.

@TubeBuddy After a chat with Europe’s biggest tech YouTuber @Mrwhosetheboss I realised the importance of spending time in YouTube Studio and understanding what’s resonating with my audience.

@TubeBuddy @Mrwhosetheboss Interested in learning more about how to grow a YouTube channel? 😃

@TubeBuddy @Mrwhosetheboss I teach an online course called The Part-Time YouTuber Academy which is the playbook to growing to 100,000 subscribers 🚀

Join our community of like-minded people, enjoy guest workshops with big creators and learn live from me 👇

academy.aliabdaal.com/?utm_source=so…