13+ Key Metrics to Track How Your YouTube Videos Are Performing

When an athlete starts a new training program, the first thing their coach does is measure their current performance level. How fast are they running? How is their heart rate? Then, the coach tracks how the athlete’s performance improves over time through training.  

If you’re ready to take your YouTube channel to the next level, you need to be your own coach. If your goal is to increase your revenue, grow your reach, boost your engagement, or more, you first need to understand how you’re doing. Then, you can figure out from there whether your strategies are working to improve those metrics over time.  

In other words, data is your friend! Luckily, there’s lots of data out there to help you. 

One of the reasons YouTube remains by far the most popular platform for hosting video content is because of its unrivaled analytics capabilities. While Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all allow you to track various performance metrics, their options are nothing compared to the data-lovers boon that is YouTube Analytics.   

However, the amount of data YouTube gives you is both a blessing and a curse. YouTube offers more than 50 various metrics in total that you can track for your videos. The question content creators face is, what do I even do with all this data? Which metrics are most important and why?  

There’s no one single answer to that question, though.

The most important metrics to track depend on your current goals and priorities for your YouTube videos and channel.

For example, an influencer who wants to grow their engagement to appeal to more brands will be focused on certain metrics; a content creator who depends on ad revenue will be more interested in other data.

To put it another way: it all depends in part on what questions you have and what answers are available to you in the data. Below, we break down some of the most significant metrics you can track in YouTube and why they matter. 

How Many People Are Watching Your Videos, and Who’s Watching Them?

YouTube Studio’s Analytics feature has a lot of great information for you to better understand your overall audience. You can assess how big your overall audience is as well as learn some key information about who they are. Think of this way:

the better you understand who your audience is, the better you can create content that keeps them hooked.

1. Views

Your number of views is one of your fundamental must-know metrics. But it’s not necessarily as simple as it seems. You should also be aware of what your view count does and doesn’t tell you. For example, YouTube defines views as “the number of legitimate views for your channels or videos.” But what is a legitimate view? It has to meet two criteria:  

1. The viewer must have actually wanted to view the video. (In other words, automatically played videos often don’t count. Beware also of signing up with third-party services that claim to let you “purchase” thousands of views, or trying to trick people into watching videos (unless it’s a rickroll, of course 😉). YouTube  works to identify channels and videos that have been artificially inflated view numbers, which violate its Fake Engagement Policy.)
2. The viewer watched the video for at least 30 seconds. YouTube can tell whether someone clicks on the videos and then immediately stops watching it. Especially when it comes to earning ad revenue, YouTube is most interested in viewers who at least stick around for 30 seconds. This is important to know because, honestly, holding someone’s attention for 30 seconds isn’t always as easy as it sounds!  

2. Unique Viewers

Keep in mind that the number of views your videos have isn’t the same thing as the number of people who viewed your videos. That’s where unique viewers come in -- it’s YouTube’s estimate of how many unique individuals watched your videos over time. So in other words, your mom watching all your videos 10 times won’t count here (sorry!) 

Unique viewers is a good metric to know for two reasons: (1) it gives you an understanding of how big your overall audience actually is, and (2) it can help you evaluate how active your subscribers are. (More on that below.) 

3. Subscribers

Subscribers are the equivalent of followers in YouTube-land. These are all the people who have clicked on the “subscribe” button to your channel. These are your most faithful audience, your return fans. Subscribers are also the people who are most likely to view more than one of your videos (or, ideally, all of them!) and most likely to engage with your content. 

It’s always good to look at your number of subscribers in relation to your number of unique viewers. If you have more subscribers than unique viewers, then your subscribers aren’t watching as many of your videos as they could be. Maybe they need a friendly reminder to set up notifications to make sure they don’t miss any of your newest videos? 

4. Audience Demographics

YouTube’s Demographics report lets you find out even more information about who’s watching your videos. It breaks down your viewers by their age, gender, and where they live (geography). Does this report on your audience match up with who you believe your target audience should be? How can you tailor your content accordingly? 

How Long Are People Watching Your Videos and How Engaged Are They?

“Give the people what they want.” That’s every influencer and content creator’s goal, right? Sometimes it’s easier said than done.

By tracking engagement metrics, you can get a sense of how your audience might feel about your content.

Learn how much they’re watching and whether it’s provoked a reaction -- and, when they’re most engaged, hear from them directly.

5. Comments, Shares, Likes, and Dislikes

Ah, engagement, the social currency of YouTube. This is the closest you get to direct interaction with your audience on the site. They’re the first metrics most creators see, and they’re probably the only metrics your audience will see (remember, they’ll be critiquing your performance as well). The savvy producer will learn how to use these stats to create a deeper relationship with their audience. High engagement rates are also often key to securing partnerships with brands as an influencer. 

6. Watch Time

This metric shows you the total number of minutes your video has played. So if you’ve had two viewers watch your 1-minute video all the way through, that’s going to be a total Watch Time of 2 minutes (it’s going to be a lot higher than this!)

Why is this related to engagement? The more engaged your audience is, the longer they’ll watch your videos. If your videos aren’t engaging them, they’ll switch to another video sooner. (See “Average View Duration” below, too.) Watch time is an important metric for YouTube’s overall video promotion algorithm -- videos with high watch times are more likely to show up on users’ feeds.

Another great use of this metric is just to burnish your own confidence. Once you see the minutes and hours that people have spent with you start to pile up, you should begin to feel like a real influencer!

7. Average View Duration

While we all want to believe our viewers are going to watch our videos all the way through, that’s just not how people work. Average view duration tries to estimate what percentage of your video the average viewer is watching. It’s the total watch time of your video divided by the total number of views. 

Average view duration is an important engagement metric. But it’s hard to use this one to track audience tastes alone. Just because this stat shows the average viewer stopping halfway through doesn’t mean something went wrong at that point in the video. It could mean a lot of people finished the video and a lot of people clicked away close to the beginning, leaving a middling average. So be careful when reading into this one! Use it as another way to track engagement and call it a day.

8. Audience Retention

Now this is the stat that will have you nitpicking your content! It gives you the percentage of viewers who watch and then click away from your video at every moment within the video. Audience retention is going to tell you where exactly viewers are tuning you out. Is it during your big musical number? Maybe a corny joke? Maybe a joke that wasn’t corny enough? 

Understanding your audience retention is the place to help you identify your weaker moments and brainstorm future content and production ideas.

9. Re-watches

Re-watches is a metric to help you identify which parts of your video are the most engaging. It shows you not just how often people go back to your videos in general, but a breakdown of where specifically in the video rewatches are occurring. 

This is a great way to drum up content when recycling your YouTube videos. Use this to find clips for best-of reels, to hit on those highly meme-able moments, or to expand popular content into their own full-length videos later.

How Are People Finding Your Videos?

As a wise sage once said, “An influencer cannot live on YouTube alone.”

In order to best serve your audience, you have to branch out -- potentially to all corners of the social media landscape.

To do that intelligently, you’re going to want to track how your audience came to you in the first place. This is true of those who track you down via the far-flung shores of a Google search, as well as those who wade through the often crowded marketplace of the YouTube homepage itself. Both within and without, it’s going to be crucial to know how your audience are reaching you.

10. Impressions

Impressions show you how well people are finding your content through YouTube itself. Put simply, you get an impression every time a user is shown your video thumbnail on the YouTube website. Each of your subscribers should net you at least one impression, but the real question is how many non-subscribers are being offered your content? A higher number of impressions means your video is performing well in YouTube’s search results or suggestions sections.

You can try to influence this metric through careful selection of keywords, but here we’re tangling with the twisting logic paths of the site’s algorithms; it’s a tough one to navigate. More usefully, we turn to the next metric on our list...

11. Impressions Click-Through Rate

The click-through rate is the measure of every time your video is actually opened via an impression. Users see your thumbnail pop up on the home screen or in a “play next” list and actually decide to give it a shot. 

Keywords are also important here, but paramount to improving your click-through rate is having an irresistible title and the quality of your thumbnail. This is your one shot to show those busy YouTube bees a flower, so make it count! 

12. Traffic Sources 

If impressions track your engagement via the YouTube website, traffic sources track your engagement from everywhere else. How did they get to your video? Was it a Google search? Was it linked through Twitter? 

The best use of this metric is to target your audience in the future. If they’re all hanging out on Facebook, for example, it’s time to up your engagement with that platform.

13. Keywords

Obviously you want to tag your content with keywords to help users find that gold you’re spinning. But don’t stop there! 

YouTube gives you a breakdown of your most successful tags -- which keywords brought you the most traffic. Collect these, analyze them, make a word cloud, research popular vocab with Google Trends, and pick the right tags to send those viewers right to your doorstep!

Other Metrics That May or May Not Be Helpful to You

The above metrics are actually just a portion of all the data that’s available to you on YouTube Analytics. Other metrics you could consider include the types of devices your viewers are watching your videos on, engagement for multi-video playlists, and a list of other videos or channels that your viewers also watched.  

And of course, if you’re in the YouTube Partner Program, you’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on the revenue-related metrics, including a breakdown of your revenue streams and how much money you earn from different ad types. You’ll probably want to track those metrics in relation to the others above. For example, if you are able to increase some of your engagement metrics, how does that impact your revenue over time?  

Good luck using and benefiting from all these metrics! Remember, when you’re armed with the right data, you can take your YouTube channel further than it’s ever gone before. 

TL;DR:

YouTube offers an awesome but also sometimes overwhelming amount of data to understand how well your videos are performing. Depending on your overall goals, some of the most important metrics relate to understanding who’s watching your videos, how engaging your videos are, and how people are finding them to begin with. Once you understand your current performance level, you can start new strategies to improve your audience engagement, number of subscribers, and more, and track how your success is improving over time.

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