Most Youtube creators know that analytics are a critical part of growing your YouTube channel. We tend to focus on real-time views, watch time, retention but is that enough?
Today on TubeTalk, Tim Schmoyer shares with us 5 Advance Analytics that every creator should be focused on in order to really take the channel to the next level!
In this episode you will learn:
Make sure you follow Tim for more YouTube insights here:
Website: https://videocreators.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/videocreatorstv
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videocreators/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/videocreators
Who is Tim Schmoyer?
Tim's company, Video Creators, has been featured by FOX, Forbes, BBC even YouTube themselves as his team trains other creators and business leaders to master the YouTube platform and use it as a place to spread messages that change lives. Their clients have organically grown by over 14 billion views and 61 million subscribers under their guidance. Today he lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with his wife and seven children.
This show is hosted by Liron Segev who is a Tech Blogger, YouTuber, and the Director of customer success at vidIQ. If you have any questions, please feel free to email liron@vidiq.com
Most Youtube creators know that analytics are a critical part of growing your YouTube channel. We tend to focus on real-time views, watch time, retention but is that enough?
Today on TubeTalk, Tim Schmoyer shares with us 5 Advance Analytics that every creator should be focused on in order to really take the channel to the next level!
In this episode you will learn:
Make sure you follow Tim for more YouTube insights here:
Website: https://videocreators.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/videocreatorstv
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videocreators/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/videocreators
Who is Tim Schmoyer?
Tim's company, Video Creators, has been featured by FOX, Forbes, BBC even YouTube themselves as his team trains other creators and business leaders to master the YouTube platform and use it as a place to spread messages that change lives. Their clients have organically grown by over 14 billion views and 61 million subscribers under their guidance. Today he lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with his wife and seven children.
This show is hosted by Liron Segev who is a Tech Blogger, YouTuber, and the Director of customer success at vidIQ. If you have any questions, please feel free to email liron@vidiq.com
Liron Segev:
Besides making amazing content, what should you as a YouTube creator be focused on? I mean, a lot of us simply look at our data, look at analytics, look at a couple of metrics and make our next video hoping that one is going to do better than the previous one. Well, if that's all you're doing, you're leaving a lot of things on the table. So today, we're going to be diving into five YouTube analytics that you need to know in order to take your channel to that next level. Let's do this.
Liron Segev:
Welcome to another episode of Tube Talk. My name is Liron Segev. I'm a tech blogger, a YouTuber, and the director of customer success here at Vid IQ, where every day we help creators big and small level up their channels, get more subscribers, more views in less time. And in order to do this, we know that data is super important. Data is like your friend, your good friend who doesn't tell you what you want to hear, but tells you what you needed to hear. And that's the beauty about data. It's an-emotional. It simply tells you whether something worked or something didn't work. And we have to spend lots and lots of times in our data in order to really understand it. So today on Tube Talk, I'm very excited to chat with the man, the legend, Tim Schmoyer from video creators, someone who's very passionate about helping people spread their message and changing lives. Tim, welcome to Tube Talk.
Tim Schmoyer:
Hey, thanks for having me. It's good to be back. It's been awhile.
Liron Segev:
You have a good history with Tube Talk, right?
Tim Schmoyer:
Yeah. Way back in the beginning, I don't even remember when that was, but I know it was several years ago, someone started it and I came on. And look at you, now you got it. And you're just pioneering and moving forward with it just as awesome as anyone else could have. So thank you for doing it.
Liron Segev:
Well, and I appreciate you being on with us. So, for the three people who don't know who Tim is, give me Tim in a tweet.
Tim Schmoyer:
In a tweet, oh boy. Well, I'm a guy who, I don't know how many characters this is going to be. I got 280, right? So, I'm a YouTube certified consultant that works with creators, started because I wanted to introduce my girlfriend and my family when I was halfway across the country, made videos, they grew, freaked out because I didn't know why people were watching, started figuring how YouTube was working. And here we are now, full time seven years now, and did YouTube strategy for Disney, for Warner Brothers, HBO, eBay, Budweiser, and TV. The Grammy's just reached out to me two days ago. So everyone from top brands all the way down to creators just getting started, helping them grow, spread their message, reach more people, change their lives and really spread what they're trying to do through YouTube.
Liron Segev:
Well, I mean-
Tim Schmoyer:
That was five tweets. I'm sorry.
Liron Segev:
I recognized I think one or two of those brand names. They're not really big, but they're okay. But what [crosstalk 00:03:25] I do love on your channel and the way that you interact with people, you're onstage around the various conferences, and people kind of gravitate towards what you say because you keep it real. You make it practical. And I love the fact that it's less theory, but more, hey, do this, then do that, then do the next thing. Because practicality kind of really gets you to that next level. So on behalf of the YouTube community, we do want a big shout out to you for doing that. So that's really, really awesome. So, let's do something a little bit different today. We've spoken a lot about the analytics and a lot of people kind of know that they need to look at certain stats, and they go into their dashboard, but they don't really deep dive into something beyond just live views and the very, very basics. So what do you think about we dive into something a little bit deeper or something maybe more advanced stuff, the next level? Does that work for you?
Tim Schmoyer:
Yeah. Like you said, most people just look at their views, their watch sign, their subscribers. The good ones will look at their audience retention. And then I see, just like you probably, all these posts on Facebook about like, "My channel's, blah, blah, blah, the YouTube algorithm hates me." And I'm like, well, did you look? I mean, the answers are usually right there in your analytics. You can see exactly what's happening. And they're like, "No," because they just post the overall screenshot of, and there's a place for the high level metrics of course. But why don't you dig in and see what's going on? And they don't do that. And you're like, well you just created a lot of drama for no reason. You could have figured out the answer just by clicking a few more times.
Liron Segev:
Are you telling me YouTube does not hate small creators? Is that what you're trying to say?
Tim Schmoyer:
I'm absolutely saying that. We work with creators all the time who are just starting out and grow very quickly, and not every one of course, but it still happens. And there are creators who are going off the platform all the time, people who are giving up, people who are quitting. There's more and more people coming on. There's still a ton of opportunity here, but you don't get a participation trophy. It's not one of those things. They don't recognize hard work and a lot of effort. They recognize actual results.
Liron Segev:
It doesn't care about the fact that you spend 10 hours editing and it doesn't care about the fact that you missed your kids' graduations because you were in the street. It doesn't feature into this, which is why the data is an-emotional. And if you understand how to read the data, you can make data driven decisions, the ones and the zeros. And I think we can dive into some of those deeper metrics, see what people should be looking at.
Tim Schmoyer:
I've got five that we typically work at or look at when we work with our clients on a one on one basis. We do look at the top level stuff like views and watch times and subs and audience attention, but then there's a few other things that we typically do, which we'll talk about here, that I think are important as the next level things you should be looking at that really help you spot more opportunities for growth on your channel. And the first thing that we do, there's a tool in there that's super valuable that not a lot of people, I did a session yesterday with a guy who has two million subscribers. And he's like, "I don't know if I should do this or that." I'm like, well, that's easy. You can test it after, what was the situation? He was like... I forget what we're trying to test, but you can test almost anything with this.
Tim Schmoyer:
And so he didn't know what groups were. He'd never heard of them before. And so I was like, all right, here's how you guys get to it, if you haven't heard of groups either, you go to your YouTube creators studio dashboard, click on analytics and the left side bar. And then click the little show more link or go to advance mode there. And it'll pop open the whole big graph of everything that's happening in your channel. In the upper left corner next to the search bar, it'll say your channel name. Click on the channel name, not next to it around it, actually on the channel name. A little dropdown menu will appear. And there'll be a tab in there that says groups. You click on groups, and then there'll be a blue button that says create new group. And you can click on that.
Tim Schmoyer:
And just title it anything you want. So for example, maybe thumbnails with faces, and then click all the, maybe put 10 videos in there that have thumbnails with faces, and then make another group called thumbnails without faces. And then add a whole bunch of videos that, maybe 10 videos, that have thumbnails without faces. Then, here's where the power of this tool comes in, you can use, all the way on the right side of the screen, you'll see at the upper right, it's blue, it says compare to. Click on that, and then you can compare groups to groups. So you can compare all the videos that are in the thumbnails with faces to all the videos with thumbnails without faces and see, oh, overall, on average, if I have a face in my thumbnail, they perform, I don't know, 10 and a half percent better. But you can do that with literally anything. And I have more uses for that, which we'll talk about as we go through some of these other things here, but I'm sure you guys use groups and stuff as well.
Liron Segev:
Yeah. I mean, groups are super powerful, and they've been around for quite a while. Even in classics, I think we had groups if I recall correctly. But they were so buried and nobody really used them. Well, once you discover the power of groups, you can then really get a good understanding of what's working and what isn't working. I worked with a good family of big channels and they were just doing lots of the normal family stuff, throwing a lot of stuff out there. And when I looked at their groups and I grouped them into games versus songs, for example, all of a sudden we saw that games were far out performing songs, which took them 10 times longer to produce.
Liron Segev:
Make less of that, more of the games, family channel blew up again. It's all about understanding it. So I love the idea of groups. And the big disclaimer that I always like to say with groups, don't let one group inform your entire decisions. Because as you know, with thumbnails, it's not just the thumbnails. It's a whole bunch of other factors. It's the topics, it's all of those. But it does give you a little bit more of an understanding of what's going on and another layer of insights, something else to feature into your strategy.
Tim Schmoyer:
Yeah. The other disclaimer I give with groups is that sometimes we'll compare two groups and we're like, wow, this thing's way off the charts. Holy cow. But then you look at that group and there's only one video in there that's got a couple million views, and all the rest have 10 views or something. It's like, okay, that's skewing the data. So you do have to look at the groups, and I'll often take off, I want to go for the median. Maybe you take off the bottom two and the top two from the list so that we are having more of an apples to apples comparison as opposed to one video just tanked or just took off, and now it's skewing everything.
Liron Segev:
Yeah. And on that as well, just I'm going to comment on your comment. It's very important again when you look at your 30 days and your 90 days is to do exactly that. You could have an outlier video that could have performed amazingly well. Don't let that be the judge of your entire channel's direction just because it got picked up on a Reddit, sub-Reddit or on Google discover pages.
Tim Schmoyer:
Yeah. So you can use groups not just to compare AB test type of stuff like that, but you can also use groups to look at topics or different themes or shows or series, like you're referring to. Another way, and we'll talk about this more in a second too, but we use them to look at how are the videos I published this month compared to the videos I published last month? So May, 2020 videos versus April, 2020 videos or whatever. And so I want to know, is the content I'm making actually growing my channel or am I just growing because I have a few heavy hitters that I published five years ago that's responsible for 98% of my growth, and nothing I've been doing for the past few years is actually helping? Happens way more often than you would think.
Liron Segev:
That is so, so, so true. You're basing content today on something that popped a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and you're basing your entire life's existence on that one thing. So yeah, critical, critical context.
Tim Schmoyer:
If you're only looking at overview content, you're like, oh, I get 200 subs a day, and you're like, okay. And then all of a sudden, 200 subs a day goes away and you're like, I haven't changed anything. And then you look at the data and then what you would actually find is you were getting 500 subs a day on these two videos from five years ago. And every video you've published since then has actually been costing you 300 subscribers per day. So the groups can help you spot things like that. Number two, this is going to sound a little bit weird, but we were working with a client. I think at this point they have six million subs. Back then, they had around four million subs. And they were like, "Tim, I want to know the difference between a 300, for him, a 300,000 view video and a one million view video."
Tim Schmoyer:
He's like, "I can't tell. I make a video. I think it's going to be awesome. I publish it. And instead of going to a million, it peters out at around 200-300,000 views. Why? What's going on?" And so we're thinking well there's data that can help us see exactly what's going on. We don't know. So we duck into his analytics. And we created two groups, groups of videos that have 300,000ish views on average and the videos that had a million views, and we compared those two groups. And we dug in like, what's the difference between these? And the next few metrics I recommend that you guys look at is based on not just that one guy's channel, but we did it again with the guy yesterday. He's got about two millions subs, and we do this a lot. And you will see a huge difference, typically, not in every case, but for most of the time you will see there is a very significant difference between the next two metrics.
Tim Schmoyer:
The first one being end screen element shown. So a video for him that was 300,000 views or less only have, I won't say the percentage because it varies a lot from niche to niche channels, channel audience to audience. So I don't want to set an expectation for anybody. But it was a certain percentage or lower he was only going to get 300,000 views. And then there's this big gap in the numbers. And then anything with a million plus had a significantly higher percentage of end screen elements shown. Now I think if we think about it, it makes sense why that would be the case because there's more people now getting to the end of the video, which means you're getting more watch time.
Tim Schmoyer:
So, shocker. But it's one easy way you can just look at one metric and be like, overall, what percentage of the people got to the endish of this, maybe not the very end, but they got to the final 20 seconds anyway of this content? And obviously the more people that did that, the higher the percentage end screen elements shown was, thus the better the video performed overall. So that really comes back to we got to hook and hold your audience's attention and that's one metric you can look at quickly to find out how well you're doing.
Liron Segev:
And then on that, it's are you just sending them to your next video or are you just waving them goodbye? It's about keeping people engaged and watching within your own content, within your own library. So what a lot of mistakes that we see time and time again, people get to the end and they do the whole, "Thanks guys for hanging out. Yeah. It's been so much fun."
Tim Schmoyer:
Or anything like, "Let me know what you think."
Liron Segev:
All those ending things, "Don't forget to like and subscribe." So you've basically projected already that it's done. But remember for you it's done, but the journey for the viewer is still carrying on. So if you watch a lot of Tim's videos as well, he gets to the end and he says, "And if you want more information about good storytelling, check out this playlist I put together for you," sending the viewer to that next playlist, keeping them more engaged on your channel. More engagement, all these beautiful signals to YouTube, good content, all of these things raise your channel. So I love that watch [crosstalk 00:16:11].
Tim Schmoyer:
Well that's actually the third one too. So you already hit. You're thinking the same way, which is the second metric that we saw was a pretty big significant gap between 300 and a million is end screen elements clicked. Which again, makes sense for the exact same reason that you just said. It's not only how many people got to the end, but then also how many people clicked, this video is so good that they want to keep going and watch more. And we saw a pretty significant gap in those metrics based on those groups as well. So use the groups. Two, look at the end screen elements shown. Three, evaluate clicks, and you get bonus points if you do what Liron said, which is get them into a playlist, and then it wasn't on my list, but it could be is, you guys, I don't know if you know this, but you can change all of your analytics instead of being about videos to now being about playlists.
Tim Schmoyer:
And you get into your playlist analytics and you can see what the exit rate is for how each video contributes to the viewer, exiting that playlist, which has the most amount of watch time in the playlist and how the session time increases if you get someone into this video in the playlist versus that video in the playlist. And so now, you can start to optimize which video should come first, which video should come second. This video needs to come out, has high abandonment. They should watch this video, they leave. And you can start to optimize the viewing session for the viewer based on your playlist analytics. So that's not in my list, but a little bonus one.
Liron Segev:
No, no, no. And I'm glad that is, because that is super, super powerful. A lot of people have a playlist with no strategy. It's more like my stuff and there's 1,000 videos-
Tim Schmoyer:
It's categories or something.
Liron Segev:
Right. It's like a folder that you store things under, but you can actually deep dive so well inside that playlist to the point, as Tim is saying, understanding what's working and what isn't working. Well, guess what? The stuff that's working, move to the top of. The stuff that isn't working, get it out of there. Deep dive into your playlist and don't just make it into folders. So thank you for the bonus tip. We'll take it.
Tim Schmoyer:
Yeah, yeah. Do not do the folders, category. It's not a WordPress category. You still need to title it so that it's clickable. The same principles that apply to making a clickable video apply to a playlist. Is the headline right? Should they click into it? Don't make all 52 videos of yours that could apply to that thing. No one's going to watch that. We found it works the best if it's a very short consumable playlist of your best content. So it's your top four, five, six, maybe eight or 10 if they're all really short videos. People don't look at that, and like, 56 videos, [crosstalk 00:18:51].
Tim Schmoyer:
And they don't even click. But if it's like, I put together the next five things that are really going to help you move forward, click right here, then on our clients, their click through rate, average click through rate on end screen we've seen is typically between, when they do it the way you said, which is just goodbye, hope this was helpful for you, people just leave, and around 0.7 to 1% click through rate. But if you naturally don't give any ending signals and just say click here and give a little pitch for it, then we've seen it go up to, our highest we've seen is 42%, but it tends to average around the 30 some percent click through rate.
Liron Segev:
Hey, we'll take that. Absolutely.
Tim Schmoyer:
30% more watch time without-
Liron Segev:
Thank you very much. Absolutely. You've done the work already. You might as well, right? Nice.
Tim Schmoyer:
So number four then is real time analytics. And we don't check this for our clients, to be honest. We encourage them to do that because we don't like to hover over their channels the way they do. Maybe I shouldn't have said that out loud.
Liron Segev:
Delete, delete.
Tim Schmoyer:
We look at the data regularly, but not every single day. And if you are one of those people who is checking it every single day, if you're not, don't worry about this one. But if you are already in there every single day looking at what's happening, definitely keep an eye on the realtime analytics because what you can see happening there is if an older video of yours starts to take off, starts to get some momentum. So I worked with several creators in the past few months who had videos that were flat for a long time and then the pandemic hit, and now all of a sudden, all their videos on Zoom tutorials and how to work from home and how to do haircuts and things all exploded. And they could see that it was happening because they were keeping an eye on the real time analytics, seeing that, oh, these videos from two years ago are all of a sudden getting a lot of traction.
Tim Schmoyer:
What you want to do when you see that happening is make a followup video, like a part two, or answering whatever the top questions are people are asking in the comments of that previous video. Just get people to have another video for them to watch after that. So, what it'll do is it'll increase the viewing session from your first video because your next video that's on a similar topic will likely get them to click and watch another one. So now you're catapulting the first video a little bit further off of the first one. And you're also getting that first one higher now too because it's leading to a longer viewing session, which is now making that first video perform better as well. So keep an eye on real time so you can not do the same video, but do, if you're doing the same video, no one has a reason to click. Make the next part, the part two, the follow up, the answering the common objection people have after your first one, something like that and get that up as quickly as you can to ride the waves of the first one.
Liron Segev:
And by the way, I like that. Go look at the comments. And if people are complaining about something specific, that's actually quite a good indicator to say, "Well, you guys didn't like this when I said this there, let me explain why. Or let me tell you why this has changed in 2020." And then there's an updated version off the next topic. Now Tim, a big question that we get all the time, it's something like, I have a video. It's starting to get traction, starting to get momentum. When should I make my next video? Should I do it immediately? Should I wait a week? Should I wait a month? What should be my time between video one and video two?
Tim Schmoyer:
It's a good question. It's a complicated question because there's two cliffs you can fall off of either side of this. One cliff is that you end up just making Zoom tutorials now. And you're like, oh, this is doing really well, make another, and you get some momentum, but then people start to think of your brand as the Zoom tutorial guy. And you never wanted to do that, but you're just following where the views are. And then pandemic stuff starts to slow down. And now you're stuck as the Zoom guy and no one really wants to watch anymore. And it's not just Zoom. We worked with a guy who grew to two and a half million subscribers by shipping himself to other countries in a box.
Liron Segev:
I'm sorry. You're going to have to say that one more time.
Tim Schmoyer:
He would put himself in a box, take his passport with him, mail himself to another country to see what would happen.
Liron Segev:
Yeah, that's what I thought you said.
Tim Schmoyer:
And he just did one video. And as you can tell, there's a lot of curiosity. There's a lot of tension in your brain right now. You have to click on that when you see it. You're like, what? How did that happen? And so all the tension in your brain, he did a good job telling the story, that video blew up. So he was like, "Oh, I'll do it again." So he puts himself in another box and mails him, and so he started building his channel. He's getting crazy momentum, but the box thing started to wear off. So he started putting himself in big, giant floaty balls and floating across canals into other countries and landing on their beaches with his passport. Now for the record, it's all fake. It's not real. But you wouldn't know that by watching. It looks very real.
Tim Schmoyer:
But he got stuck in this rut. He's like, "Tim," he says, he's doing a session with me. He's like, "I don't want to do this anymore. But if I do anything other than mailing myself to another country, it doesn't get views." So that's the one cliff, you don't want to get stuck in that. But on the other hand, and the danger there is just always like, hey, this video is doing really well, and so you upload the, to answer your question, the next day, three days from now, every week, and then that one keeps going, and then you get stuck in that. Okay. So you would need to really keep your brain clear of what you're about. Otherwise, you'll end up in really weird places and places it's pretty hard to recover from honestly.
Liron Segev:
Like in a box.
Tim Schmoyer:
Well, yeah, but his case he's like, "I can't do anything else. No one watches it. How do I pivot?" And the answer to that is you need to really establish why this matters. Establish a creed and a belief. Guys, this channel has never been about mailing myself in boxes. This is about seeking adventure wherever we can find it. You're going to have to do the boxes thing a few more times while saying that to get that into the mind of your viewers, but then you can start to pivot to doing adventure in other ways.
Liron Segev:
Yeah. Good advice.
Tim Schmoyer:
The other cliff then is just never responding and never paying attention and being like, "I'm only going to do one Zoom video or one mail myself video," and that's probably not wise either. So I don't think I'm really answering this question other than somewhere in between. I think it's fine to do a couple Zoom videos or box mail yourself videos in a row, but just don't get stuck in that rut or else people will-
Liron Segev:
And the big thing is, unless you want to. If you want to be known as the Zoom guy, then that's a good strategy to follow. But if you do want to do lots of other stuff, then it gets a little bit harder to pivot out of that.
Tim Schmoyer:
The last one, the fifth one is very important for creators. And again, because if you're only coming back and looking at high level metrics, you're not really getting a full picture, like we've already indicated. You could have some videos that are really performing and nothing you've done since then really is, but you don't know that because it's all mixed together. So we think it's really important to look at period over period. And if you're looking at that, again, the advanced metrics, you can look in upper right corner, click on the date range, and there's an option there for period over period.
Tim Schmoyer:
And you can use the compare tool to see that. And we think it's really important to look at a lot of different things like this month versus last month or this year versus last year. And the reason this is valuable is for two reasons. One, it'll help you spot a lot of seasonality with your channel. We have creators all the time who are like, "My channel is tanking, it's dying. There must be an algorithm change or something." I'm like, okay, well let's look. And then we'll do the period over period. We're like, oh no, you went down the same time last year and then came back around two weeks from now.
Tim Schmoyer:
Let's wait and see how it happened. Two weeks later, he's going, "Oh, nevermind. The algorithm favors me again." No, the algorithm didn't change. There's seasonality, and it helps creators panic a little bit less when they can see that. And if you're brand new getting started, you might not have that data built up yet, but over time you definitely will. The second thing is that when you're just staring at your analytics every day, it's hard to see growth when you're like, it's hard to see the mural when your nose is pressed against it. So period over period is a really good way to step back and take an overall look. You're like, man, I feel like I've been stuck at 100 subscribers per day for a year. You know how the weather, there's the feels like temperature, and then there's the actual temperature.
Tim Schmoyer:
That's what's happening here. So you do the period over period and you're like, "Oh no, I've actually been doing this 100 subscribers a day for only about like three months now. I'm not stuck." You look at period over period, like this time last year, I was getting 100 subscribers per month. That's 30X growth, but you don't see it. And so you get really frustrated when you're just looking at it that closely. So I think it's encouraging. It gives you a better perspective of the health of your overall channel. And yeah. So I think those metrics are pretty important too.
Liron Segev:
And I love the idea of taking a helicopter view. Because sometimes you're just so close to and you're so day to day and in the ground stone of actually releasing content and working out strategies and social media. And the new tech talk that's on the block, should I get into it or not? You're just so involved in the weeds, but sometimes it's a good idea to take a helicopter view and say, "Okay, where was I this time last year? Where am I going to? What is my overall mission? Where should I be going to?" And again, remember things like budgets and quarterly things that brands work.
Liron Segev:
They work on 90 day cycles. Could this be a slump because we know leading up to Christmas, big jump, post-Christmas, not so much. But so all of these factors kind of really take into account that it's very, very easy to panic. I'm looking at my channel. I am seeing that it's breathing nicely. It's got a good, I work out what my baseline is, and I see that some videos now, I've just launched them and then not doing quite as well as I think. Should I wait a couple of days? Is there a golden rule, 24 hours? Is there anything like that that I should be looking at to know, okay, this one's underperforming, I need to start changing? Any tips for us on that front?
Tim Schmoyer:
I would look again at realtime for that. That's another use for real time analytics to see normally my videos do about this, but this one's underperforming and we feel comfortable changing stuff right away, first hour, two hours. The key is to just keep an eye on the real time. So if you make a change, and we usually try thumbnails first, not that there's any science behind it or anything, but that's just kind of where we're at. We try thumbnails first and then if that's not doing anything, then we'll play with titles too. But it's just hard if you change too many things at once, you don't really know what's working, what's making a difference and what's not. So, if you left it live for three hours before making a change, leave it live for at least another three hours so you can have an apple to apples comparison on the difference.
Tim Schmoyer:
And if it's like, oh, it's performing even less now, and it's hard too, it's hard to know exactly because the notifications will go out and it'll have whatever the title or thumbnail was when the notification went out. And then so people later can still be clicking on the old title or thumbnail and getting to the new title or thumbnail. So it's not like a perfect analysis. It's just kind of like the best we got, and we can't filter out views from notifications. So we'll experiment pretty quickly on it. Sometimes we just don't care enough to do it. We're like, it did good enough.
Liron Segev:
It is what it is. Let's move on. I think it's also important to creators to know that it's okay to experiment. It's okay to zhuzh things up every once in a while. I mean, if you look at Tim's channel, there used to be a lot in the studio. Now, Tim goes outside for a nature walk and there's a car driving by. And that's perfectly fine.
Tim Schmoyer:
And I did that because I did the groups, my analytics to see black background versus sitting in my backyard. And the more natural environments way out perform the studio environments. Not way, it was, I don't know, like 12-15% more or something. So then I was like, oh, well, if that motion do it, let's do some walk and talks versus sitting outside. And the motion tended to hold people's attention even better. So that was all...
Liron Segev:
Oh, wait, hold on. Are you saying you experimented and then you discovered what works and did more of it? No.
Tim Schmoyer:
We do lots of experiments, probably too many. We don't do one thing long enough to actually get traction. We do, but we're always, I just love to mess with things and change things and see how this work, and okay, that's working great. But what about this? Could this work better? And we don't like to stay on one thing long enough to see the actual longterm benefits of it, which is part of my job. It's part of what we like to do.
Liron Segev:
You have to break it to know how to fix it. So Tim, this has been amazing. Lots of golden nuggets. Really appreciate spending time with us. If people want to find you, they want to follow your journey, they want to learn from you, which I think they should, where can they find you on YouTube, on social media? What's the best place?
Tim Schmoyer:
Yeah. I would love to have you guys join us over on our podcast. We have a new episode every Tuesday. You can search iTunes or whatever podcasting app you use for Video Creators. We're on Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, all the places. So we've got new episodes where my team and I really try to dive deeper into some of this next level stuff and beyond the basics, but all right, you ready to grow or infuse growth? How do you do that? So, we'll take a good [inaudible 00:33:30], good chunk of time to dive into that. And so we'd love to have you guys there. Youtube.com/videocreators is our channel. And if you want our free guide to the secret to building your YouTube audience, you can go to videocreators.com.
Liron Segev:
Fantastic. And all of those will be in the show notes below so that you guys don't have to remember. You can just go clickity click and get there immediately. Tim, always fun. Looking forward to seeing you at an event in the future when we are allowed to travel again. I don't know when that's going to be, but always fun hanging out. So, thank you again for sharing your knowledge with us. Appreciate it.
Tim Schmoyer:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Liron Segev:
Thank you very much. And for the rest of you guys still hanging out here, don't forget to share this episode with at least one other creator that's perhaps struggling, perhaps is not looking at the right analytics or even worse, not looking at analytics at all. Big, big mistake. Share this episode with them so they're able to be inspired, they're able to understand what's working for them, make those changes and succeed on this wonderful platform that we all love so much. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button in your favorite podcast application. And I will see you next Thursday on another episode of Tube Talk.