YouTube has added a range of new analytics tools to help provide creators with more insight on the performance of their uploads, channel membership growth, specific revenue impacts, and more.
First up is new Members’ insights, which displays total and active members over your chosen time period.
Important to note that this is paying members via Channel Memberships, not channel subscribers, who follow your channel, but watch your videos for free. Channel memberships enable viewers to join your channel through monthly payments and get members-only perks “like badges, emoji, and other goods”.
As explained by YouTube:
“When creators come to us and talk to us about memberships, what they typically ask is ‘how do my memberships evolve over time?’, ‘which of my videos helped me win or lose more members than usual?’, and the third is ‘does it help if I remind my audience to become paying member?'”
This new graph will help to answer these questions, with more in-depth insight into membership activity.
You can also look up data on total, active, gained and lost members over time, which will provide further info on how your efforts to increase members are going, or how each of your uploads impacts your member count.
YouTube’s also making its ‘Other Channels Your Audience Watches’ and ‘Other Videos Your Audience Watches’ listings available on mobile. Both of these listings are currently available on desktop, but will now also be available in the ‘Audience’ tab on mobile as well.
It’s also making its video performance explanation more visible in Analytics on desktop.
As you can see here, channel managers will now see up front explanations about the presented data, which should provide more context to help manage your content.
YouTube is also adding more insights on revenue changes, highlighting potential shifts by viewer region.
As explained by YouTube:
“If revenue is going up, or down, because of the fact that the audience has shifted to a higher or lower CPM country, we’re calling this out.”
Variable tax laws and processes mean different impacts for YouTube revenue, and in order to provide more transparency around such impacts, YouTube is now looking to provide more specific data on regional impacts in your process.
And finally, YouTube has added a new post engagement metrics display, which shows votes and likes on the channel’s top posts over the last 28 days.
The new options are mostly tweaks, and refinements on the available tools, but they will help to provide more specific context on YouTube channel performance, and how you can angle your strategy to align with key shifts.
How you utilize each element in your approach will come down to your analysis of the numbers, and what you’re trying to achieve, but more data can only help in mapping out a better strategy to improve your video performance.