Speaker 1: Check it out. YouTube has a new metric in your analytics that breaks down your audience between new viewers and returning viewers. Both of these new metrics can be extremely helpful in helping optimize your content strategy for growth on your channel. In fact, I've been waiting for metrics like these to become available for a very long time. But you need to know how to use this data in conjunction with your content strategy for any of this data to have an actual impact on your channel's growth. Let me explain. Hey, guys. My name is Tim Schmoyer. Welcome here to Video Creators, where we are all about equipping those of you who are established creators with next level tactics you need to further grow your audience and the business around that audience so you can reach more people and change their lives. And this metric is going to definitely help you do that. First of all, to access this new analytic, simply go to your YouTube Analytics, click on that Audience tab at the very top, and then you'll see that new metric right in front of you called Returning Viewers, which will break down how many of your viewers within the selected date range are returning, which is like the number of people who watch one of your videos and then came back and watched another video later, versus how many people are new viewers, which shows how many of your viewers watched the video for the very first time during that same selected time period. These are very important metrics to have access to now because the goal of your content strategy is to take a first time viewer and turn them into a returning viewer, right? Well, kind of. Not exactly. There's actually a really big glaring piece that's missing from all this, in my opinion, which I hope YouTube gives us access to later, but we'll talk about that in a second. Before we get into that, we have to talk about how do you actually use these two metrics that you do now currently have access to. And it works best if you're implementing what we call here at Video Creators a three-bucket content strategy. Basically, you have a strategy that intentionally moves this first time viewer into a second time viewer, into a third time viewer, into a dedicated viewer, into a customer. Like, how do you take that first time viewer and what are you doing intentionally to move them across that journey with you, with your channel, and your brand? Unfortunately, what most creators do is they have like 15 different goals for every video that they publish. They want every video to get a lot of views, get a lot of subscribers. They want it to get a lot of comments, a lot of likes. They want it to rank number one for about five different search queries. They want it to go big on Reddit. They want everyone who watches it to share it. They want it to generate a lot of traffic to their website, generate a lot of sales, get a lot more Patreon people subscribing and supporting them there. They want a lot of people to join their email list. The list goes on and on and on. And nowhere else in the marketing world do we make this mistake of one piece of content is supposed to do 15 different things equally. It doesn't work that way. That is perhaps the best way to make one video act like a Swiss army knife. It might do a lot of different things, but it does none of them well. Instead, what we want to do is craft every video we publish to intentionally accomplish one specific primary goal and use that as a step for leading our viewers across a viewing journey with us on our channel. The first bucket being discoverable content. These are the videos that you're creating to intentionally go out and get a first time viewer, someone who's never heard of you before. In fact, they frankly don't even care about you yet. The only reason they're clicking on your video is because your title and your thumbnail created some sort of intrigue. It created some sort of curiosity. It created tension in this viewer's brain that's prompting them to want to resolve that tension. And the only way they know to resolve that tension is to click. And that could be because the title and thumbnail is teasing a story, or it's pitching some sort of value, or something surprising, or something a little bit unbelievable. We're not talking click bait here, but we are talking intriguing. Click bait is if you give a promise and you don't deliver. You're not going to do that. You're going to make a promise in that title and thumbnail. You're going to set an expectation for that viewer. And they are going to click with that expectation in mind. And you are going to deliver on that by the end of that content. When you're shooting that discoverable video, you're keeping in mind that this is this viewer's very first time on this channel. They don't know who I am. They don't know anything we're about here. This is their very first exposure. And so you're blowing them away the first part of that video with that content, which is amazing value, exactly what they clicked for. But somewhere between the middle and the end of that content, you need to get them to not only just be like, wow, this content was amazing. But I kind of like this person. And I kind of think I want to watch more. And there's some things you can do that. We talked a lot about primal branding here before, as well as several other tactics. I'll put links to other videos down below if you want to learn more about how to do that. The only action you want that person to take is to watch one video, and then another video, and another video, and another video on your channel. If you can get that viewer to watch one, two, three, maybe four, five videos of yours in a row, other content on your channel becomes far more likely to be surfaced to the home page for that viewer, or show up as suggested videos next to other content they're watching later on the platform. And staying in front of that viewer is far more valuable than getting them to passively click a little red button. And it's also the first step in taking that first-time viewer and turning them into a returning viewer. Once you've turned that first-time viewer into a returning viewer, now you need a second bucket of content, which we call community content. Now, these community videos are ones that are not intended to go out and get a lot of views, are not intended to go big or blow up, although hopefully that certainly happens. But instead, you're talking more specifically to your existing audience, the people who are now speaking a little bit more of your inside language and are familiar with your brand, and are kind of here maybe even for more of a relational value than the ones who are here just for the content value itself. And there is certainly a spectrum, a continuum of that for people, so it's not like a clearly defined thing. But this is something where you're making a video for your existing audience, and you're going to publish it, and it might not get a lot of views, and that's OK. The main goal here is to grow the know, like, and trust factors with your existing audience. How do you deepen that trust? How do you deepen that relationship and maybe even become more credible with them, or whatever that community goal is for you and your channel? And for this bucket, the only call to action you have here is to ask the viewer to engage with you in some way. The first ask for Discoverable was just keep watching more of my content. Let me keep give, give, give, give to you. And now the second ask is a little bit more of an ask. It's like, hey, why don't you start interacting and engaging with my brand? That could simply be to comment. That's typically what it is. Like, let's engage in some way. But it doesn't have to be. There's a lot of other ways to do that. You just really want that interaction to start taking place. And then that leads to the third bucket, which is the sales bucket. Now, you've brought people in with Discoverable. You started engaging them, growing the know, like, and trust factors a little bit more deeper with the community content. And now this viewing journey is now leading to the point where, like, hey, they're ready to make a transaction of some kind. A transaction could be financial, which could maybe be supporting you on Patreon, going to your website, and buying something. But it really is any time we define as any time you're asking that viewer to take an off YouTube, off platform action, which would be buy, download, sign up, register, whatever. Like, whenever you say there's a link down below, go click it, leave this website, end your viewing session, pop out of the YouTube app, or whatever the case may be, and go take this off platform action. The reason we separate that from the community and the Discoverable video is because you're reducing the probability of it actually becoming widely discoverable if it keeps ending the viewing session by getting people to successfully click your link and go over to this other website. It's not a terrible idea. Like, and sometimes it makes perfect sense to do that in the sense of, like, an affiliate where you're reviewing a product. And adding that link that ends the viewing session actually adds more value to the viewer. Appropriate, fine to do so. But what we're talking about here is more like when you want them to go download that free PDF, or get that free course, or buy that thing from you, or go visit your sponsor, or something like that. In a Discoverable video, that first time viewer is very, they're less likely to actually convert into being a customer and making a transaction on their very first exposure to you. So it takes more of that viewing, that sales funnel on your channel from Discoverable to community to sales and actually for that to actually happen. It's kind of like we're just implementing an email funnel here, where you have a lead magnet that gets them in. You have a nurturing campaign for like three, or four, or five maybe emails once someone signs up. And then it leads into a pitch for a sale after maybe email five, or six, or seven, something like that. We're doing that exact same funnel, but here with video content on our channel. So hopefully now you can see just how important these new and returning viewers metrics are for evaluating how effective our Discoverable content is and evaluating how effective our community content is. However, it is very important, in my opinion, that when you're using this metric in your analytics, you use the publish date filter from the dropdown menu to filter out all the videos that are really old on your channel that may or may not still be currently aligned with the direction of your newer content on your channel. What that does is it allows you to eliminate from the data all the older videos on your channel and just look at the newer ones that you've been publishing. And it helps you evaluate, is what I'm doing now actually moving my channel forward? Or am I just still floating on like two, three, four, maybe five really good heavy hitting videos on my channel that make up the majority of my traffic? It should be more important to you that your current efforts are actually moving your channel forward and contributing to growth and that you're not just relying on some videos you publish maybe five, six, eight years ago. Now, there's two things that are still really missing from this metric, in my opinion. Number one is that, as of this recording, you can currently only see this at a channel level. You can't break it down to a video-by-video basis, which is what we really need to evaluate each video individually to see how did this one I published last Friday. It was intended to be discoverable. How did this video, eliminating the data from all other videos on my channel, how did this one perform in moving my channel forward? Hopefully, that's a feature YouTube gives us access to sometime soon. But there's also a second thing that's missing. And that is I'm really glad YouTube gave us this new and returning viewers metrics. But it's really missing a third one, which is dedicated viewers. So what if we got someone to watch one of our videos for the first time, and then they watched two or three of them, and then they left forever, never to return? That's not what we're going after either. What we really want is a first-time viewer to become a returning viewer to turn into a dedicated or loyal viewer long-term. That's really the viewing journey we want to accomplish with our content. The problem is, though, is that it's not easy to define what is a dedicated viewer, a loyal viewer. How would you define that? Because it varies significantly from channel to channel, audience to audience. A client of ours has primarily a high audience in India. That loyal viewer is going to look very different than someone in the US, UK, Canada, Australia. That viewer is going to look different. What if it's a made-for-kids channel versus someone who's targeting senior citizens versus college students versus young professionals, educational versus entertainment? There's a lot of different variables that really go into this. And it's not easy to define what that dedicated viewer would look like across all genres, across all different types of channels on YouTube. I'm not really sure how to solve that problem. Maybe it's that YouTube lets us define what we think a dedicated viewer is for our channel. Maybe it's someone who watches 50% of our previous 10 uploads or something like that. I don't know. Now, what if you look at this metric in your analytics and you see that I have way more returning viewers than I have new viewers? Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe you have way more new viewers than returning viewers. What should you do in that situation? Well, Rachel over on the YouTube analytics team created a video exactly about that situation over on the YouTube Creators channel. You can click right here and learn what you should do in either of those two scenarios. Click there, and Rachel, we'll see you over in that next video.