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YouTube Promotes Content Creators Through Customer-facing Metrics

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At any given moment, YouTube has over 1.3 billion users interacting with its site. This number isn’t limited to just viewers either but also includes content creators. In fact, over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. For content creators that means that they have a lot of potential competition to wade through if they want to get their content seen by others.

To help with this, YouTube employs customer-facing metrics on their platform that creators can use to evaluate their videos: checking which strategies work and which ones don’t. And they display these metrics through a simple and elegant system. By doing this, YouTube shows how utilizing customer-facing metrics effectively pull their customers deeper into their orbit, and reinforces their relationship with them.

Up-front Metrics

YouTube continually develops its graphics and visuals for its customers. It’s current iteration displays useful and relevant information to creators the moment they access their YouTube Studio. It does this in the form of the Dashboard tab.

The Dashboard of the YouTube Studio displays a number of different widgets. The widget on the left provides creators with a snapshot of the stats of their latest video in comparison to their 10 most recent videos. With this widget, creators can see the “watch time,” “views,” and “average view duration,” of their video all at once.

The widget in the middle is a YouTube news feed. This widget keeps creators up-to-date on what’s currently going on with YouTube. So, for example, if an update comes along that might affect how monetization works on a creator’s videos, this widget will notify them.

The far-right widget allows creators to see their top-line analytics for up to the last 28 days. Here, creators can check on how many subscribers they’ve gained, how many views their channel has acquired, and the total watch time of their collective videos as minutes. They can even see what their top-performing videos have been within the last 48 hours. Increases and decreases to any of these values are notated in simplistic colors as well: green for increases and red for decreases.

Right below the far-right widget, there's another labeled “known issues.” This widget acts almost like another “news feed” widget. Creators will be able to see any current issues that are affecting the YouTube platform. For instance, if YouTube is experiencing a documented outage or some other issue that would affect multiple YouTube channels, it will be displayed here.

Finally, there's a “Ideas for you” widget. This widget compares a creator’s channel to others that are similar in order to see if there’s any resources that the creator might not be leveraging. So if one channel is doing something that’s producing beneficial results, this widget will recommend the idea to the content creator.

More In-Depth Analytics Made Simple

Beyond the Dashboard, YouTube content creators have the option of delving deeper into their channel metrics by clicking on the “Analytics” tab.

YouTube has made its new analytics section incredibly easy to read and interact with. Each widget is clearly labeled and easily definable. They’ve created five different reports that all serve to deliver the most relevant data for content creators to further grow their channels.

Each of these reports also features headlines that summarize the data of their respective reports. In other words, they simply tell the creator what’s going on in clear and concise sentences. This is something YouTube implemented in response to feedback from their content creators. Some preferred their data to be given to them by word rather than through charts and graphs.

Graphs still do appear on the UI, however, and are easy to navigate, and a date changing widget in the top right corner allows content creators to manipulate the graphs to span as far back as a year. YouTube videos that the creator has uploaded are displayed along the bottom of these graphs as small “play” icons, and the creator can click on these videos to look at their data specifically.

If content creators want a deeper look at their data, they can click on the graph to get specifics on certain dates, and then manipulate the graph to focus on displaying their preferred metrics.

YouTube Thrives Through Customer-facing Metrics

YouTube understands the value that customer-facing data provides. With this information, YouTube shows that they care about their users and that they view their relationship with them as somewhat of a partnership. With customer-facing data, creators can make better content, which keeps viewers on the site, which then generates profits for YouTube -- everybody wins: viewers get better content, creators get more viewers, and YouTube thrives from the engagement.

Here at Keen, we understand the intricacies of customer-facing metrics and the best tactics with which to deploy them. We make it simple. If you would like to learn how you can take advantage of customer-facing metrics, contact us today.

About Keen.io

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Keen is a software company that builds tools and infrastructure to help developers deliver in-product analytics to their customers. SaaS businesses of every size — from startups to Fortune 500 — use our platform to flexibly and seamlessly integrate data into their product experience.

Data is everywhere these days. In fact, 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. Your company’s data potential is at an all-time high as well. You know what you want to record and convey to your customers. But, in practice, the implementation to capture, analyze, and present this data is not a solved problem. Fortunately, at Keen, we love data - and we’re experts at helping our users collect, store, query, and present customer-facing analytics.”