The Complete Guide to Twitch Stats

Published in

The Emergence

6 min readJul 23, 2017

How do you see who is watching your Twitch stream? In this guide I run through the recently updated Channel Analytics (previously called Stats Dashboard), which gives you all the data and insight on your Twitch stream and viewers you need after your stream has finished.

This the best way to tell if anyone is watching your stream, other than monitoring it while live, which we never recommend.

You are able to find your stats here: https://www.twitch.tv/broadcast/dashboard/channel-analytics

What does it show me?

You are able to select ‘recent stream’ or the past day, week and month.

Average viewers — the average viewers you see over the course of your entire stream
Live views — How many views your stream got while you were streaming
New followers — How many people followed you while you streamed (does not count offline viewers)
Max viewers — the maximum concurrent viewers you saw
Unique Viewers — your per stream average views measured by devices used (so, if somebody watches via a laptop and an hour later their phone, they’ll count as 2 unique viewers)
Minutes watched (Max watch time) — the total time watched on your stream(s)
Average stream length — The average length you broadcasted
Time streamed — How long you streamed for over the time selected
Average chat messages — An important factor in the engagement during your stream

There is a pretty chart that shows your average viewers and new followers along the bottom.

An ‘hours streamed’ heatmap box can be found on the left hand side so you can monitor how consistent you are (a key way you grow your channel on Twitch) — This has been removed in the April 2018 update

“Coming soon, you’ll be able to find new, relevant stats to help you grow by seeing which channels and games your viewers are watching when they aren’t watching your content. With that information, you’ll be better equipped to decide when to stream, what to stream, or who to collaborate with, for example.” — Twitch

Views from Twitch

Do your viewers come from followers, from browsing the category pages, from searching the search bar or from landing on your channel page and watching your live show via that? This is one of the most useful parts of your Channel Analytics, and one you should understand best.

For example if viewers are coming from the Browse Page, this means your Stream Titles are working (and should continue to be something you work hard on…). While, if the browse page is low, you should re-think your stream titles, or maybe you are working in a category that is too popular!

Views from Channels

Although this isn’t super clear, it usually means that the viewers have come directly from another channel’s page. While this is typically a host, auto-host or raid, it could also mean they just clicked on your channel while viewing the other, or they clicked on the sidebar

Views from Outside Twitch

Rather than counting the viewers coming from inside Twitch, this part of your analytics records if they’ve come from external sources, such as typing in the URL in the browser, or other websites such as Twitter or Medium. (Annoyingly some sources don’t show up, for example it looks like Discord shows up as ‘external’… which isn’t that useful).

Unfortunately you are not able to see these stats on the iOS or Android apps just yet…

You can find a great YouTube guide to the old stats information here, but with the new dashboard being updated all the time I imagine this will be updated soon!

Stream summary

After every stream (after a 15 minute delay), you will see a summary of your overall stream, with helpful stats and achievements shown.

What is the most important thing to look at?

Personally I think average viewers is the most important Twitch statistic to monitor. As both the Affiliate and Partner programmes use this as the most important criteria for entering, it’s important that you understand what made people stick around for the longest time.

Alternative tools:

Although Twitch provides a fantastic starting point for your stats, there are many alternatives that you may find useful due to their design or additional facts. I have highlighted the best ones here for your overall channel but I’m sure there are many others that are useful for monitoring your chat etc.

Streamlabs — https://streamlabs.com

Let’s ignore all the other streamlab features and study the dashboard. This allows you to monitor the money part of Twitch, such as donations, Bits and subscriptions (for when you are a Twitch Affilite/Partner)

TwitchTracker — twitchtracker.com

Twitch Tracker allows you to monitor and analyse both your own stream, any game or any other streamer.

It provides in-depth stats on:

The number of followers and subscribers
Average concurrent viewers and followers per month (for the past year
The most played games while on stream
A streaming summary featuring insights on games played per stream and average length of streams

SullyGnome — https://sullygnome.com

While it may not be the prettiest tool out there…SullyGnome comes with so much data it is almost too much.

Alongside the usual channel stats, including some truly useful average viewers per game (see above), SullyGnome also comes with game information saved from 2 years’ worth of data.

DayZ is seeing a resurgence in popularity!

Socialblade — socialblade.com/twitch

A useful tool for seeing your overall stats and growth over a length of time. Socialblade is incredibly useful to see how well friends have been doing too with the Twitch viewer graph and total followers per month!

Twitchtools.com — www.twitchtools.com/stats

A simple comparison tool may be useful to those seeing to see how they have grown over a long period of time. Unfortunatetly the other thing you can view is number of overall views (which is something that the Twitch Dashboard lacks).