Hello insiders, I'm Patricia, I'm a product manager at YouTube Analytics, and today we're going to talk about some of my favorite topics, analytics, of course, and some of hopefully your favorite topics, the algorithm. I'm here today with Rachel, who is going to help us out with some of these questions. Rachel, do you want to introduce yourself? Hi everyone, I've been on the channel before, but I'm Rachel. I work with Patricia on analytics, and I also work with Todd a lot who've seen on Discovery. So my job is to help creators understand how Discovery works, how your videos get discovered, and then work with Patricia, and how that becomes a feature in analytics. So Patricia, you're actually working on something that I've seen before, but it's a new feature that helps creators understand how their videos get discovered. Can you show me what it looks like? Yeah, definitely. So we've been working together on this feature to help you understand better your videos performance. And this is actually a new video overview in analytics. I think Connor actually called it out a few weeks ago on a newsflash, so you might have seen that. And what's new about this new analysis is that we really call out front and center two metrics that you've heard Todd and Tom talk about a million times, click through rate and average view duration. These are super important signals to understand your audience interest in your topic, in your title, and your thumbnail, as well as then your content once they start watching. But we know that these two metrics are not the whole story. So we want to go in a little bit deeper today and understand what are the cases when it's not always about CTR and AVD as we call it. So Rachel, let me just throw a few examples at you and help me explain them. My video is doing super well. I'm getting a ton of views, and now I go and I see on this report that click through rate is actually as low as it's ever been. Why does this happen? Yeah, so I'm really glad you asked that. Click through rate is a really tricky metric to understand. So a lot of creators, if you go in, you look at your most successful videos, the videos with the most views, those are actually the most likely to have the lowest click through rate. Those videos are being shown to a really broad audience who are less familiar with you and your content, and it's natural for them to be less likely to click. And on the other hand, some of your smaller videos that were shown to a really relevant, small, targeted audience are the most likely to click. And so those might have a really high click through rate. Todd, sometimes, you're first of this, is a paradox. And this is isn't a problem for our discovery systems because we actually have predictions where we can tell how likely an individual user is to click and watch a given video. Now, however, it does make it hard sometimes for creators to interpret your video performance, and if your title and thumbnails are working well. And so what we recommend there is to always look at a combination of your click through rate and your impressions. And this new feature that Patricia has so kindly worked and developed hard to give you will help call that out for you and when to pay attention to when your video might be performing and when that's due to your title or thumbnail or not. In the long term, we hope to have a B thumbnail testing eventually that will help give you even more concrete answers. Okay, here's another one. I've heard from creators that are very aware that they're click through rate and average duration are important metrics. And they are concerned that by getting a lot of traffic, let's say, from external websites or Google search that their average duration is actually dropping and they're having shorter views and that this will ultimately hurt their performance on home and on watch next. What do we have to say about that? Yeah, so I know this concerns a lot of creators when they see those overall metrics dropping. And as we spoke about before, that's not always a bad thing. So in discovery, we actually look at how a video performs in the context it's shown. So when a video is shown on home, how does it perform there? And home and watch next each of their own ranking models. So in the home example, we're looking at when we are recommending a video on home to a given user, how likely that user is to click watch and enjoy that video. In addition to factors like personalization, like how much that user already watches that channel or topic. So overall, click through rate and average duration is a pretty good indicator about how your video is doing in general. But it definitely doesn't cover all cases and each surface actually has their own ranking model. So having more traffic from external is not going to hurt your discovery or how your video is being recommended in home or watch next. Sometimes you have to do deep dice into individual traffic courses. The good thing about the new module is that we actually already filter out, click through rate and average duration just for home and suggest it so you don't have to worry about the effects of external and other sources on those two metrics. Now let's take another case. Video length. We've heard from a bunch of you that you think it's not fair that we compare average duration for videos that are of different lengths. What do we have to say about that Rachel? Yeah. So in discovery, we actually look at both relative and absolute watch times. Those are both meaningful signals and how your videos are going to be recommended. You would still need to do some cross referencing, even if we swapped out average duration for average percentage viewed. Because it's easier for short videos to hit a really high amount of average percentage watched. We can only focus creators on so many metrics. We chose average duration. Because how much time somebody spends with you in your content is a really strong indicator of interest. That being said, we want videos of all lengths to succeed on YouTube and get discovered. Okay, so here's another one we get very frequently. Click for rate is fine. Average duration is also fine, yet the video is still under performing. For sure, there must be some issue with the algorithm. What's going on here? So this is also the most common question that I receive from creators. And click through the average duration are one of dozens of signals that we will use for search discovery. But there's also a lot of other factors that are going to influence how many impressions your videos get and how many people watch them. So I'm going to talk about three of them, competition, topic interest and seasonality. So competition is one factor that can influence your impressions and that is our viewers choosing to watch more of other videos outside of your channel on our platform. So high competition can also limit the amount of time that people are spending with you in your your own content. The other one is topic interest. So some people on YouTube will watch videos about a really niche topic and some topics have bigger audience sizes than others. For example, soccer, there are more people in the world interested in soccer than there are in golf. Sometimes soccer videos will get more views than golf and that's not because our algorithm has a preference. For soccer videos, it's just there has a larger potential audience size for that kind of topic. The other one is seasonality and that gets into platform level trends about how many people are actually on YouTube at different times of year watching videos. Another key moment where we get a lot of these complaints is September when people are starting to go back to school and you see more viewership go towards the weekends. So I'd say other factors that can influence impressions are competition, potential audience size and topic interest and seasonality. So we know that even if click through ray and average reiteration are high, there are other reasons why your video might be performing just as usual or perhaps underperforming. Okay, so one final piece of feedback that we keep getting from all of you is around wanting to compare click through ray and average reiteration not with yourself and your past videos, but with other channels similar to yours. This is actually something that we're looking into and hopefully we'll have more to share in another sneak peek coming soon. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, so a few of you already have this new feature on your video overviews. If you do have it, please check it out and send us feedback with that blue link, send feedback. The whole team reads everything you have to say to us from engineers to designers to myself. So we really, really appreciate that. Keep it coming. And if you have any other questions or comments, just leave them in the comment section below. Rachel, anything else to say? Thanks for watching and we really, as Patricia said, appreciate your feedback that helps us improve these products for all creators. So keep it real.