Tips to understand your live stream performance
While your channel's overall health gives you the big picture, another valuable analysis comes from diving into the performance of individual live streams. It can be helpful to think about a viewer's journey through a funnel to identify opportunities for improvement:
- Appeal: When your video is recommended, does your content catch the viewer’s eye and make them click? (Click-through rate)
- Engagement: If they clicked, did they actually watch? (Views)
- Satisfaction: Did they watch for a significant duration, and will their experience encourage them to return? (Average view duration)
Content Tab in Analytics (Sort by Videos, Shorts, Live or Posts)
Key metrics
Select the chip for "Live" on the Content tab to see how your live streams are performing both during and after the stream has ended.
Impressions |
Impressions click-through rate |
|
Definition: How many times your live stream thumbnails were shown to viewers. Includes only impressions on YouTube, not on external sites or apps. |
Definition: How often viewers watched a live stream after seeing the thumbnail. |
|
Insight: This metric can help you to understand the reach of your live stream. |
Insight: This metric helps to indicate how appealing the thumbnail, title and live stream content are to viewers. Adopt patterns from your popular live streams to improve CTR |
Views |
Average view duration |
|
Definition: How many times your content was viewed. This is compared to your live stream's typical performance. |
Definition: The average minutes watched per view for the selected content, date range, country/region and other filters. |
|
Insight: Over time, this metric can help you to spot high-performing live streams, anticipate seasonal changes and decide when to go live. |
Insight: Over time, the amount of time that viewers watch your live streams will help to show changes in audience interests. |
How viewers find your live streams
This report highlights where viewers are finding your content and how they are discovering your channel.
|
Overall |
External |
|
Of all sources, this lists the most popular. This includes places both external to and within YouTube. |
From outside YouTube, audiences may be finding you from internet searches, embeds in other sites, and so on. |
|
YouTube search |
Suggested videos |
|
This lists all of the popular terms and words that audiences used to find your content. |
Traffic from suggestions that appear next to or after other videos, and from links in video descriptions. |
|
Playlists |
|
|
Traffic from any playlist that included one of your videos. These playlists can be your own playlist or another creator's playlist. You can see specific playlists that drove traffic to your videos on the "Traffic source: Playlists" card of the reach tab. |
|
- Find ideas for new content in the search terms viewers are using to find you.
- Which are the top sources for your channel, and what does that tell you about your audience? Example: If YouTube search is the highest, audiences are coming to YouTube to find you or expect to find content like yours on YouTube. In this case, what could you do to increase traffic from other avenues such as external sources to expand reach for more impressions?
Top live streams by views
- Do you see any patterns in which streams tend to be more popular?
- Do you notice changes in popular content at different times of the year?
We recommend
If you produce multiple content formats, it's key to compare videos of the same type. Audience behavior is different across formats, therefore success may look different. Different formats are meant to support your channel goals, whether it’s meaningful community or broader audience reach. Remember that on the Content tab, you can use the chips to filter your data and see how your different formats perform.
Next: Check out tips on decoding the relationship of CTR and impressions