Analytics for YouTube: Studybreak Tabletop
Welcome to my analytics report!
I am a project manager for the Youtube channel Studybreak Tabletop. Our social media management is usually done by other parts of our team, but I created this analytics report to better understand for myself how to grow our channel. I don’t want to fall behind!
Studybreak Tabletop is currently a video archive for our recorded Dungeons and Dragons sessions. For most of the members, this is our first video production series. As such, it is a great learning opportunity for us!
As part of our channel, we make three different kinds of content:
In the future we plan to branch out to try new video formats, but this is what we want to focus on currently. We will see!
After doing some research on LinkedIn Learning, talking to a content manager peer, and investigating YouTube’s own learning resources, I’ve come up with some goals we should work towards to grow our channel:
- Vary our video thumbnails to add more “clickability”.
- Keep our video upload schedule consistent.
- Be patient as we grow our following over our first year.
To understand how YouTube treats our content we need to establish some ground terms:
- Impressions are counted when YouTube serves a video on a user’s home page or recommended watch list.
- AVD (Average Viewer Duration) describes how much of a video viewers may watch.
Simple, yeah? I’ll show you our numbers to make it all clearer.
Initial Analytics
I met with, Steven, the manager of the Futbollazo310, a channel with a steady following and high view count. He recommended that I focus on analyzing Studybreak’s AVDs. It was very cool to get some insider info from someone who’s been working hard to keep a channel running!
YouTube associates high AVDs with overall quality content. If a viewer didn’t watch all the way through, it may be a sign of poor quality. Not what we want to serve! YouTube’s algorithm will recommend our videos if our viewers stay engaged all the way through.
As you saw in the first visualization, YouTube has taken an interest in our channel. More than 2,000 people saw our thumbnails on their home screen! Steven observed that when a new YouTube channel is created, the algorithm “tests out” the channel’s reliability during the first 6 months, serving its videos to many users and evaluating its upload schedule.
As you can tell in the visualization, our initial burst of impressions has decreased and will probably level out according to YouTube deciding our ranking.
AVD Comparisons
I noticed that the shorts and the long form videos were performing differently, so I wanted to examine the AVDs of them separately. You can really see the difference when I split it up like this!
I took the top 5 viewed shorts on our channel and compared their AVDs:
I did the same for our Long-Form content as well:
Notice that our best performing Short was gaining more than 100% of average duration! Because Shorts only play for a few seconds each and they loop automatically, it is very easy for viewers to watch a short all the way through multiple times.
This is entirely different for our Long-Form content. They have a hard time limping past the 10% mark for viewer retention. This is also to be expected of videos that last over an hour.
In all, we are very early in our YouTube career. YouTube will provide us with better analysis as we upload more videos and get more views. If we keep people curious about our videos with varied thumbnails and keep them watching with quality content, I’m sure we will see a clearer way forward by the end of the year.
