Evan Carmichael explains that watch time is YouTube's single most important ranking metric, not views. He tracks daily subscriber counts in Excel and compares watch time across content series to find what underperforms. YouTube counts total session time across all channels a viewer watches, so keeping people on the platform benefits your ranking.
Questions this video answers
Watch time is the most important metric; focus on total session watch time, compare relative watch time across series, and track daily subscriber and view counts in a spreadsheet.
Chapters
Okay, the next question came in from Marisha. For YouTubers who are looking to use data to make important changes in their business for 2016, what metrics should they be paying attention to most? Thank you so much. Great.
I, I feel like this is one that you should cover because you probably know way more than I possibly could, but I will say before handing it off to Evan because he is the expert in this, um, it's my understanding that a lot of the YouTube analytics are the same as Google Analytics. So if it were me, and I'm not Evan, but if it were me, I'd be looking at the amount of sessions that come in, the impressions that were given, the time spent watching the video, any type of consumer action that happened during that time. I would consider that my KPI or my, you know, the bar, and I'm constantly trying to jump that bar is what I'm doing. But Evan, please, I leave it to you.
Okay, so with YouTube, watch time is the most important variable in their system. If you have high watch time on your videos, then you will get ranked higher. And it's not just watch time, um, on, on a particular video, it's then their entire session. So YouTube wants you to stay on YouTube as long as possible, 24 hours a day. So if you come and watch one of my videos, then you leave my channel and watch 10 hours of Justin Bieber, I get credit for all those 10 hours too. And so that's YouTube's goal. And if you look at your analytics now, they recently changed the backend where watch time is number one thing that you see. It's the first box when you log into your YouTube backend. It used to be views, and now it's— so it's watch time. And so if you're doing a deep dive on your videos, you could look at one series versus another. And I know Marisha's channel a little bit, um, she has different series. She has like Whatever Wednesdays, Whatevs Wednesdays, and she'll do some singing videos. What you can do is compare those two series, right? Take videos in those series and compare the watch time on them, not the absolute watch time, but the relative watch time. So if your singing video is 5 minutes long, it'll show you how it compares to other 5-minute videos on YouTube, and you'll see if you're above or below the average. And if you're below, then what can you do to make it better, right? How do you— I don't know— sing better, or bring in friends, or pick different songs, or maybe don't continue that series, right? Um, So I'll always track, you know, I track my daily, daily. I'm kind of obsessed. I have this Excel file and I'll track my subscribers and I'll track my number of views on the channel. After saying that, Evan, if you're keeping an Excel file, we should partner up.
I'm telling you right now, because that's, that's my life.
You keep Excel files too. I like it. But yeah, but like on an individual video basis, watch time is going to be the most important thing.
