Why Your YouTube Metrics Are Decreasing And What You Can Do About It

Imagine this scenario: you created a YouTube channel and consistently publish and monetize content. But key channel metrics have suddenly dropped — number of views, subscribers, viewer duration and retention, and comments and reposts — all metrics are falling.

What is happening, and how can you figure out the reason? Most importantly, what can you do to increase channel statistics again? That’s what we analyze in detail in this article.

YouTube KPIs You Should Be Tracking

The number of subscribers and views has long ceased to be the key indicators for the success of a YouTube channel. You can now monitor the data of more than ten metrics in analytics. They give a comprehensive report about your content’s current status and show the dynamics of its development. Here are some of the metrics:

• Number of views
• Number of subscribers
• Total viewing time
• Average percentage viewed
• Average view duration
• Audience retention
• Unique viewers

If new video content is released regularly, the optimal outcome is to see sustainable numbers gradually growing among the analytics indicators. Yes, some videos can go viral and cause viewer and subscriber numbers to skyrocket. But if you look at the statistics for 28 days, three months, or even a year, you will likely see a roughly flat graph with insignificant deviations.

When you measure a YouTube channel’s success, it’s essential to look at metrics comprehensively and track their ratio. Indicators may differ depending on the channel topic, geographical area, and age characteristics of the target audience, but on average, they will be as follows:

1. Engagement rate (ERR) = comments / total video reach * 100%. The optimal ratio is 0.5%. For example, if a video has 10,000 views, a good indicator of audience engagement would be at least 50 comments on the video.
2. The popularity of your videos is the ratio of likes to the number of views. The optimal indicator is 40 likes for every 1000 views.
3. The ratio of the number of channel subscribers to views. On average, this indicator should be about 14%. If your channel has 100,000 subscribers, the videos should get an average of 12,000–15,000 views.

Reasons Why Your YouTube Channel Is Not Growing

Okay, we’ve figured out the ‘best case scenario.’ But what if the situation is the opposite? There can be many reasons why your channel statistics have suddenly dropped. We can organize the roots of the problem into three large groups:

1. The interaction between the channel author and viewers — your content no longer attracts subscribers; you communicate minimally; your interactions with the audience are not attractive.
2. Internal optimization and factors that attract viewers to your channel — poor video optimization, lack of collaborations with other channels, irregular publication of new content, and your viral videos have lost reach and no longer sustain the channel.
3. Interaction with the YouTube platform — your channel developed a seasonal decline, the algorithms changed, your videos violated the community rules, and YouTube stopped actively promoting them.

This list could go on and on. The indicators of each YouTube channel are unpredictable in their way. Meanwhile, “reviving” a channel can be a long and creative process. However, there is a basic algorithm of actions you should try to restore your YouTube channel statistics.

Read how to resuscitate a YouTube channel in Gyre’s new blog article: https://gyre.pro/blog/why-your-youtube-metrics-are-decreasing-and-what-you-can-do-about-it.