YouTube Rolls Out New Channel Metrics, Personalized Dashboard Within ‘Studio’ App

YouTube will soon provide creators with three new metrics to help them better understand their reach — as well as a specially-designed dashboard to serve as a one-stop-shop for personalized channel stats and growth tips.

The updates, rolling out in coming weeks, will live within the Creator Studio app — a channel management platform that the company rebranded as YouTube Studio last June. YouTube says that YouTube Studio, which is exiting beta, is currently being used by hundreds of thousands of creators, and the company has harnessed recent feedback in order to launch the latest updates. In the next several weeks, YouTube Studio will be the default display for users, the company said in a blog post — though creators will have the option to revert to the old Creator Studio format if they so choose.

The three new metrics that the Studio app will soon offer include: ‘impressions’, ‘impressions click-through rate’, and ‘unique viewers’. An impression occurs whenever a viewer sees a creator’s thumbnail on YouTube — including on the homepage, subscription feed, search, or ‘Up Next’ section, according to the company (see below). Impressions click-through rate, however, shows the percentage of impressions that turned into views. YouTube notes that optimizing titles and thumbnails can help improve this latter figure.

Unique viewers, on the other hand, count how many different people have watched a creator’s videos over a certain period of time — regardless of whether they consumed the clip on a mobile or desktop device, or whether they watched more than one video on a channel. YouTube notes that creators can compare this figure to total subscribers in order to identify videos that have broken through to a wider audience. Unique viewers can also be key to ascertaining reach when negotiating brand deals, according to the company.

Finally, YouTube is set to roll out a dashboard within YouTube Studio that it says will display personalized stats in one easy-to-find location. The dashboard will comprise a snapshot of how a creator’s most recent video is performing compared to previous uploads over the same time period. The dashboard will also comprise personalized recommendations culled from YouTube’s educational Creator Academy to suit individual channel needs, as well as any pertinent platform news and updates.

“The dashboard will roll out to all channels over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll continue to add more content based on your feedback,” wrote product managers Assaf Reifer and Ezequiel Baril in a blog post detailing all of the Studio updates, which you can check out right here.

Last month, YouTube also removed some demographics data from creators’ analytics reports to protect viewer privacy.