Hello insiders, today we're going to talk about one of the most important questions of all time, how to understand and how to analyze your video and channel performance. Over the past few years, we've been adding a lot of tools and insights and YouTube analytics, but we also heard feedback that you want us to walk you through steps for diagnosing your video and channel performance on your own. So today we're going to talk about watch time decline and how to understand what's happening with your channel. Let's get into it. First you need to understand whether it's a single video that's causing a drop or it's a group of popular videos. For example, it might be the case that one popular video is experiencing decline in watch time and is dragging total channel watch time down. In one specific video has suddenly dropped in watch time while others are performing well, you can look at other factors. For example, if it was a recent upload and after a spiking performance, the video is experiencing a drop off, it's normal. It's typical to get most of watch time in the first few days. Make sure the video is still set to public. Sometimes an accidental flip will obviously cause a drop and third, you probably want to check if the video was recently claimed, because the claim might block your video in all countries or in several countries. If your channel watch time has been gradually dropping off, you might want to answer the following questions. Question number one, did anything change? Did you change thumbnails, titles, content, changes in content strategy can lead to dramatic changes in your performance? For example, I saw a channel where creators changed thumbnails for the most popular playlist and it almost killed the watch time. Viewers didn't recognize their content and didn't watch their content as a result. Question two, during what time did you notice a performance drop? For example, you always need to expand your day-trange to get a better understanding of your typical performance. It's a typical mistake to analyze performance at a micro level. It's best to look at performance over time as channels are highly volatile and during the day your performance might experience volatility up to 40 or 60%. How can you check this? Go to creator studio analytics, overview tab, expand main graph, keep selected for watch time, select day-trange, last 365 days, or last here in the drop down. What should you look for? Think of this as a sanity check. Is performance truly dropping dramatically or has it already hit lows like this previously? Did you recently have a spike in watch time and now your video performance is just normalizing? Question number three, is there any seasonality involved? Each channel has unique audience and seasonality can have significant impact on how much time people are spending on YouTube. Know this can be challenging to measure if you're a new channel but don't worry, in some time you also will be able to compare to make this period of a period comparisons. How can you do this? Go to watch time reports, watch time, day-trange this year, add comparison, day-trange last year, or simply use quick period of a period comparison option. Question number four, how frequently do you upload? Change in video uploads can directly impact watch time and audiences can grow accustomed to consuming content regularly. If you change your upload schedule, it's normal that you can see a decline in watch time over time. So how can you check this? Go to your whitehead deep dive and select videos published. There you can see how many videos you published in the past 30 days in the past year and you can compare if something changed over that period. Question number four, how do you perform among your subscribers? So how to check this data? Go to audience tab and YouTube analytics and select watch time from subscribers card or go to whitehead deep dive, traffic sources, select browse features, subscriptions, and use single-line graph. Ask yourself, is there a decline in subscribers watch time? If so, probably a new content isn't as engaging as your previous videos. And lastly, review Google trends. So our recommendation system follows the audience and reflect action of viewers. If viewers lose interest in the channel or a topic, the content is less likely to be recommended in tabs like home or suggested. So use Google trends for that. First of all, go to your YouTube analytics report, traffic sources, select search for a selection of keywords to use in Google trends, and then go to Google trends, trends.google.com. Search keywords and expand day to range to last five years and filter for YouTube search. Ask yourself, are your brand terms a channel named declining in popularity or maybe the topic that you're reviewing is declining in popularity? This is quite a frequent case for gaming channels when popularity of some games can go down, and therefore popularity of the channel also goes down. These are a few ways you can bet and understand what's happening with your channel and what's causing a drop in channel performance. And let us know if it was helpful and if you have any specific questions in the comments. Keep a trail.