Did you know that you can confirm the number of YouTube subscribers that actually click on your notifications? To find out how just do the following:
- We will begin where we always do, on the YouTube front page.
- Click on your profile image and then go to the new YouTube studio.
- Next, click on the Video tab on the left-hand side
- Go to the video manager screen.
- When you mouse over a video, you will see some icons.
- Click on the graph icon to go to the analytics for that particular video.
- On this screen, click the ‘Reach’ tab at the top, and then halfway down the screen, you should see an analytics panel labeled ‘Bell notifications’ sent.
Bell notifications are the number of subscribers on your channel that have switched on all notifications.
The notification click-through rate is the crucial analytic we're interested in here. It represents the number of subscribers who actually clicked on the notification to watch the actual video. As YouTube states, typical CTR on notifications is between 0.5% and 2.5% percent.
Here's what I'd like you to do now. Go and find one of the most popular videos on your channel, and take a look at the notification click-through rate analytics.
YouTube CTR Analytics: Why That Metric Matters
The notification click-through rate metric is an extension of data that YouTube rolled out to creators last year. You can access the data by going to Channel analytics, and then clicking on the Audience tab at the top of the screen, and scrolling down to Subscriber bell notifications.
As you might expect, we did a full tutorial on that data at the time, so you can check it out here:
As a suggestion to YouTube, what I'd love to see here is the notification click-through rate for your entire channel over the last 28 days. Oh, and I'd also like to add it as a metric in the advance analytics for individual videos too, thank you very much.
Now, for me, these analytics have been somewhat of an eye-opener. We currently have 475,000 subscribers, and over 35,000 of those clicked on the notification bell, and yet that only generates 500 views. Doesn't really seem worth it, does it?
However, as with all analytics, you have to put it into the context of your channel as a whole.
Those first 500 views are valuable for the first couple of hours of a video's launch, to get that velocity on your content. However, through our experience with the vidIQ channel, an educational channel, we know that we're going to get the majority of our views, over the long term, from browse and search.
For other channels where the storytelling and the personality is far more important to the channel itself, then you would expect a higher click-through rate on notifications. But remember, it's still, at a benchmark level, relatively low at 2.5%.
So, ake these analytics from a few videos, and benchmark them. Let's say your average notification click-through rate is 1%, then aim to improve that to 1.2%, or 1.4% over the next three to six months.
Want To Get More Views on YouTube?
If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and get more views on YouTube then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps click here to install now!
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