If you make films and videos you want people to watch them. So you upload them to Youtube. Great, but how do you know if they’re getting enough views and likes.
We're going to show certain key ratios youtube doesn’t give you and how to calculate them, so you’re not left in the dark.
YouTube is a huge, daunting, exciting place to watch videos of all kinds. And whether you produce narrative films or nonfiction videos you pretty much need your videos on YouTube.
But once you start uploading, for some period of time it's a slog. The first stats you watch are right there in your face as they slowly trickle up, there for everyone to see, views and subscribers.
You make and upload more videos, all the time wondering are you showing your films to a half-empty theater?
Just because you can see your views and subs doesn’t really tell you anything useful. You can’t compare yourself to a channel that’s been around for 8 or 10 years or that has a completely different subject matter than you.
FilmRiot reached a well deserved a million subs this summer after 11 years of posting. But their other channel, Variant Comics, has already been at a million after only 5 years because their audience, comic book fans, are a much larger base than filmmakers.
So unless you’re an insanely dramatic comedian with mad jump-cut editing skills like Sailor J who went from 0 to 100k subs in one month, you need better stats to pay attention to. But she deserves it because no one counters like her, no one.
KPI
Well, the good news is, Youtube’s been around long enough that there’s enough data out there that you can compare to. MatPat and Stephanie of The Gamer Theorists channel gave a pack-filled seminar on Youtube Statistics at Vidcon this past June. Here’s some of the gold they gave us.
We’re going to look at what in the business world is called KPI, key performance indicators. A KPI is a value that demonstrates how effectively you are achieving your objectives. A KPI for the health of your car might be how many miles per gallon it gets and you would measure that by logging your speedometer each time you gassed up and how many gallons the pump took to fill your tank. millage today - millage last fill up/# gallons from the pump.
A Sales KPI
This junk mail, officially called direct-mail, because it's mailed to you directly versus you discovering the offer on your own, wants me to subscribe to their magazine. How many subscribers to every 100 pieces of this mailer do you think is considered a success?
Would it be 1 to 2 subs out of a hundred, 4 to 7, 11 to 15? Do you think all of those are low and it's actually higher? If you said higher, sorry you're wrong very wrong. 1-2 subscribers out of 100, a 1 to 2% success rate, is considered a winning direct mail campaign.
They call this conversion. How many people you've converted from kicking the tires to an actual sale or taking another significant call to action like signing up for a email newsletter or in our case, subscribing to your Youtube Channel.
Subscribers per Views
On YouTube views equate to the direct mail pieces and subscriptions to your channel are the subscriptions, our most important call to action for viewers.
So what is considered successful in the YouTube world? An average is 3 to 5 subscribers per 1000 views. That’s a .3 to .5 % success rate. That makes sense if you think about it.
Just because you liked a youtube video or found it valuable, doesn’t mean you want to subscribe to their channel. Watching videos is one thing but viewers are serious when it comes to adding you to their already full subscription list.
So here’s how to calculate that KPI. Currently, our channel has 520 subs and 22,740 views. Subs divided by total channel views, times 100 to make it a percentage, is 2.3%, well above the .5% average. Okay, that’s good news.
Comments to Views
Comments aren’t as effortless as hitting a like button. It does take time, effort and thought for someone to actually stop and devise a suitable comment. YouTube looks at it as a form of engagement and a good one. The average is five comments per 1000 views. That's .5%. Our channel currently has 150 comments divided by 22,740 views. That's .66%, just above average.
Views to Subs
Once you get subscribers, how many views can you expect on a video? You may upload videos that on average get 50 or 100 views. Is that low? High? What? The average is 140 views per 1000 subs. That’s 14%. So if you have 500 subs like us, you should expect around 70 views on average for a video.
Likes to Views
Hitting the like button is easy and effortless but not everyone does it, so how many are good? The average is 40 likes per 1000 views, that’s 4%. We have 664 likes in total for our channel, sounds good, divide that by 22,146 views and we get, 2.9%. Oh, below average.
But this is good information to have. We know we’re doing very good in certain areas but not in others. So now with a year of content and 50+ videos, we can look at individual videos and see how their likes compare. This could tell us what types of videos are more popular or not.
Now all this begs the question, great if your stats are good, but what if they’re not? Hunker down and we’ll give you a video next week to help focus on a bunch of awesome resources that will give you the guidance you need and figure out what is and isn’t working.
We’ll also talk a little bit about ranking on youtube, seeing as how it’s the second largest search engine after Google, the people who own youtube. In the meantime, start calculating those stats and we’ll see you next week.
Editing / After Effects
Gali Segal
https://www.linkedin.com/in/galisegalhorowitz
Music
“Right Place, Right Time”
by Silent Partner from YouTube Audio Library
Our Amazon Affiliate Store
https://www.amazon.com/shop/influencer-cfdace38
Thanks to our YouTuber buddies at the Small YouTuber Zone group for letting us use their clips:
Dylan Swain https://www.youtube.com/user/DemonDill
The Caitie Diaries https://www.youtube.com/user/TheCaitieDiaries
Iain Richards https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKRi_8ihLwJ1ImAnX_OmK8g
BlackJack Legacy https://www.youtube.com/BlackJackLegacy
Becke Griggs https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtGrStplFHmL3ovQCs7MFog
Rashawn Bass https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq3ED7CmbN0OFfzZhbj5cTg
Links
Sailor J https://youtu.be/zJaaLXZwmsU
The Game Theorists https://www.youtube.com/user/GameTheorists