YouTube Launches 3 New Viewer Metrics
In the last week YouTube has launched behind the scenes 3 new viewer metrics for it's creators to make use of.... but what does this mean for your business?
First lets get an overview from Head Beard Bruce.
YouTube has had these metrics in beta testing since June 2017, and now they're getting pushed to the wider community - so if you don't have access to them, you shortly will through your YouTube Studio.
So What Are The Changes?
The 3 new metrics are: Impressions, Impressions click-through rate, and Unique Viewers
Impressions is a count of when a viewer sees your video thumbnail on YouTube. This won’t be tracked everywhere on YouTube, but it's expecting to be from the YouTube homepage, subscription feed, search and in the “up next” section. Whilst that's not an exhaustive list, its a good start.
Consider Impressions to be like Facebook's 'potential reach' - it’s a potential opportunity for a viewer to click on your video and watch.
Impressions Click Through Rate is where you can tell if a viewer has actually seen and then clicked on your video thumbnail. If you're seeing a lot of impressions, but no click through - it could be an indication that your thumbnails need work.
Unique Viewers shows an estimated number of unique viewers who have viewed your video. So repeat views are not counted within this figure.
Why the Change?
In our eyes, one word, Facebook.
Facebook provides statistics on it's marketing reach all the time, and they often look more impressive when compared to YouTube.
That's not to say it's fair view.
Just as an example Facebook measures 'a view' as 3 seconds, whereas YouTube defines it as 30 seconds. One could argue that the content length on the platforms is different - Facebook tending to be a lot shorter than YouTube's 10min average - so it's appropriate to measure it differently... but either way, many users are often not aware of this.
And so when businesses are looking to spend budget they look at the numbers, without always understanding them, and as such Facebook looks as if it stands head and shoulders above YouTube.
Advertising revenue is big business, and both platforms know this. The battle continues.
So What Does This Mean for Your Business?
In all honesty, unless your business is focused on YouTube and building viewership on there as a separate platform, then it's worth knowing, but won't change anything too much. It will give you some data-digging opportunities, but it's unlikely to affect how you do things.
If, however, your business is working to make YouTube part of its core business - then this is definitely a great change - it provides greater insight into what's happening and allows change to occur. You now have an opportunity to review what's happening with your channel in greater depth.
Let's Wrap This Up
YouTube intends to roll the changes out over the next couple of week, and they say they'll continue to add more features depending on feedback.
Whatever happens, you can expect them to continue changing the platform - for one, it's tech and two, Facebook.
Beard Out
