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There are four numbers that'll tell you why your podcast isn't growing on YouTube. My name is Kevin Michael. I'm the founder of Grow the Show. I've helped more than 500 podcasts grow over the last eight years. And recently, I've had several clients go from like 100 views an episode to over 10,000 views an episode. And the way that we got there was by focusing on four specific numbers in YouTube Studio. So today, I'm gonna walk you through what those four numbers are, what they mean about your show, where you want them to be, and if they're not where they should be, how to change them so that your show can get more views, more subscrib, and ultimately make you more money. Now, one of the reasons I so strongly recommend that business owners with podcasts leverage YouTube is because of all this data you see, in audio, you really only get two metrics to understand how you're doing. Downloads and completion rate. When you're trying to grow your audio podcast, it's really difficult to know what to change, what to do better, what's working and what's not. You just put episodes out there and you get a download number, and that's kind of it. It is a horribly frustrating and lonely experience. And I can tell you from experience, when you're an audio podcaster and you just look at your download number and you have no idea. It's not going up. It sucks. Now, that's not true for YouTube. YouTube gives you the opposite problem, because YouTube gives you a tremendous amount of data. It's almost overwhelming. And if you open up YouTube Studio and you're a podcaster that's just used to looking at downloads, it can feel like drinking from a fire hose. But once you understand which pieces of data to zoom in on, it becomes a really fun game that you can win way easier. Now, like any game, the key to success is knowing the difference between your inputs and your outputs. So with a podcast, your output is downloads, views, and subscribers. It's the last thing that happens when everything goes right and that's what everybody wants, and they obsess over, right? But it's really hard to be successful if you just focus on the outputs. What makes it way easier is if you focus on your inputs, what can you actually manipulate? What can you change about what you do to make the outputs go where you want them to go? Now, these days, 95% of my job as a podcast growth consultant is helping businesses and clients read their inputs and understand what needs to change so that they can get their outputs and get it growing. And after helping several dozen shows grow on YouTube, I've been able to identify what those key inputs are. So let's walk through what they are, what they mean, and how to influence them. Now, what's funny about this is YouTube actually tells you exactly the two inputs that they care about the most. So if you go into your YouTube studio and you look at the little funnel that they show you with number of impressions and number of views, there's a little I. And if you hover over the I, it'll say something like, if you want more views and increase your click through rate and your watch time. And that is literally YouTube telling you, if you want more views, here is what you need to do. Click through rate is the percentage of people who see your video as an option and actually click on it. Watch time is the total amount of time that people have spent watching in total. All humans, how much time in total have people spent watching this video? Now, watch time being a key metric for YouTube is the reason that podcasts are absolutely crushing right now. Because if you publish a 60 minute podcast episode on YouTube and and one person watches it all the way through, that is 60 minutes of watch time that you have achieved for that video. If you publish a 10 minute video, you need 10 people to watch the video all the way through for you to get the same amount of watch time. And it is much easier to get one person to consume 60 minutes passively than it is to get six people to consume 10 minutes actively. So with podcasting we have a overall advantage and so let's put that advantage to work. So these are the four metrics to look at to diagnose why your podcast is not growing on YouTube. In order, each one tells you something different. The first one is impressions. Impressions are how many times YouTube showed your thumbnail to somebody. It's not clicks, it's just eyeballs on the thumbnail. So that's when your video shows up in recommended to watch next. It's when your video shows up in the home tab. It's when it shows up in the sidebar. It's basically when YouTube says, I think this person might be interested in this video and it shows it. If your impressions are low, it means that YouTube doesn't know who to show your content to. And this is almost always a clarity problem at the show level, not at the episode level. What do I mean by that? Well, many times your podcast doesn't have a clear enough identity as far as the YouTube algorithm is concerned. You're covering too many different topics for too many different types of people, and the algorithm can't lock in on who your audience is. Think about this from the YouTube algorithm's perspective. If one of your episodes is about marketing and the next is about mindset, and then the next one is a rant about something that happened to you, or all three of those videos are going to be interesting to three separate audiences, and YouTube has no idea who to show which one to, so it doesn't show it to anyone. The fix to this is making sure that your podcast makes a promise. Your show needs to serve one type of person and point towards one destination every single episode. Now, I'm going to go deeper on this in an upcoming episode because getting the podcast promise right is the hardest and also the highest leverage thing that you can do for growth. But if your impressions are consistently low, I would start there. The other factor that keeps impressions low is topic selection. So every time you pick a topic for your episode, you're deciding the size of your potential audience for that episode. Some topics have a massive idea tam. TAM stands for total addressable market, and idea TAM is the total number of people who are interested in the topic of your episode. So if your show, if your episode has a massive idea tam, that means that tons of people are gonna be interested in their show. Pro tip. One of the biggest idea tams right now is AI. These days when people ask me what should I do to grow my podcast? I jokingly say, make your podcast about AI because it is the fastest way to get a huge audience because it has the biggest idea tam. So some topics have a really big idea tam, but others are more niche. There's fewer people that are interested in that specific topic. Neither of them is wrong. But you have to know that this is the case and you should be able to pick your topic based on how many impressions that you want to get. And a quick caveat for you business owners, your highest impression episodes are rarely your highest revenue episodes. I've seen this over and over. The video that gets the most views is not the one that makes the most money. Impressions are a growth metric more so than a revenue metric. So keep that in mind before you chase topics just because they're super popular now. There is no magic number to shoot for with impressions. The game is just looking at which of your videos has gotten the most impressions versus which one hasn't and asking yourself what was different about the ones that got more. That's where the patterns start to show up. So the second Metric to look at is your click through rate. If your impressions are decent, but your click through rate is low, that means that people are seeing your video and they're deciding not to click on it. That is almost always a packaging problem. Now, packaging is your topic, your title, and your thumbnail. It's three T's. I call it triple T attraction. And yes, your topic has to do with your packaging as well, because when you have a 60 minute podcast episode, you. You cover a lot of topics in that 60 minutes, but you can really only pick one topic for your packaging. So picking the right topic of your 60 minute conversation is crucial in getting the packaging right. So topic, title and thumbnail are doing all the work of getting. Someone who just sees the video pop up in their feed, say, ooh, I want to watch this, and they click on it. But if you want to get really good at packaging your videos, we actually have to zoom in a little bit on that moment when someone sees your video and clicks on it, because that is a split second. But a lot happens in the viewer's brain in that split second. So here's what happens. First, the viewer is shown like 10 thumbnails on the screen. One of them is going to grab their attention and they're going to enter this process. Number one, they look at the thumbnail first. They say, okay, do I understand what this is? This grabbed at my attention. What do I think this is? Does this look interesting to me? Okay, if they like what they see in the thumbnail, then they read the title next. And they value scan. They say, okay, is this title? Is this episode about something that I want to consume? If yes, the next thing they do, they don't click yet. They zoom out and they look at the entire packaging together. And there's four things that make up that whole picture. It's the thumbnail and it's the title. So they look at those two things again and say, okay, now that I've read the title, does the thumbnail still look like what I want? If yes, they look at the number of views the video has, and they look at how recently it was published. More views and more recent both help, but the thumbnail and the title are doing the heavy lifting. And those four things together, title, thumbnail, views, and recency are what make up packaging. And I'm telling you, in an absolute split second, the viewer decides whether to click on your video. It's not conscious. So the most common mistake that I see with packaging is that podcasters just slap a headshot of their guest's face on the thumbnail and maybe put their name on the title. Or they like put tons of text and information in the thumbnail that make it look like an event flyer and nobody reads it that fast. You have to convey one specific, curiosity driven, interesting idea that makes someone think, ooh, I want this in an absolute split second. And there's a real craft to this. I'm probably going to write an entire new episode on title and thumbnail strategy at some point soon. But in general, what I found when I'm trying to get a show off the ground is we want to aim for above 3% and what we really, really want is above 5%. That's when things really start to move. 3% is kind of status quo. Below 3%, your packaging is really holding your show back. But when we get to the 4, 5, 6 and 7% range, that's when we start to get episodes that become outliers and vastly outperform what the show has already done so far. The third metric for us to use to diagnose why our show isn't growing on YouTube is 30 second retention. This is the one that podcasters rarely even look at, and I would argue it's actually the most important. So if you go into the YouTube studio and you click on any video, you can go to the engagement tab and look and scroll down and you will see a retention graph and there's going to be a huge cliff in the first 30 seconds. And YouTube is actually many times going to show you a little message that says X percent of people are sticking around after 30 seconds. That is the key to understand whether or not your video is going to perform. Now, the numbers on this are a little crazy because little differences in the percentage that shows up result in massive differences in how many views you get. So most popular podcasters that I see that aren't growing are sitting around the 30 to 40% retention at the 30 second mark, which means that 60% of people turned the episode off within 30 seconds. And that is a huge problem. So a 40%, 30 second retention will basically stop getting views almost immediately. If you raise that by just 10 percentage points, which is an improvement of 25%, that is good. A 50%, 30 second retention is really good. 60% and above is where things go crazy. That's when you start to see intros that have nailed everything that you have to get right in the first 30 seconds. And the best of the best, we're talking like million subscriber folks sit between 60 and 70% retention. Now keep in mind, a difference between 40% retention and 60% retention is not a difference of 20%. It is a difference of 50%. So this 40 to 70% range is where all the difference is. And literally taking a video from 50% to 60% retention I have seen is the difference between 200 views and 20,000 views. Now, if your video is below where it needs to be for 30 second retention, that is almost always an intro problem. What do people see when they first press play? What most podcasters do is they grab a clip from later in the episode and just throw it in the beginning as a hook. But that only works if that clip accidentally does the job of an intro. And most of the time it doesn't do the job. Think about it this way. If you wanted to get somebody to read a book, would you rip out page 75 and make them read page 75 and be like, don't you want to read the rest of this book? They'd be confused. It starts right in the middle of the story. They don't know who the characters are. They have no context. They'd be like, I'm confused. I know less now about this book than I knew before. Also, you're like giving away the best part. That's what most podcast intros are doing. They're dropping people into the middle of something. They don't know who's talking, they don't know what we're talking about, and people get confused and turned off because the confused mind says no. The other thing that people do is they do no intro at all. Which is fine if you already have a huge audience or if, like you have a really famous guest or something like that. But really what I found is best for shows that are trying to get off the ground is for the host of the show to put energy into recording a 30 to 60 second direct to camera intro that makes the viewer understand what this episode is about, why it should matter to them specifically, and why they should stick around. So if your 30 second retention is dropping off a cliff, that is the quickest and most efficient way to fix it is to just record a quick intro that says, hey everybody, this is what we're doing today. Let's get to the show. Now, I should note that this is a very, very different world from audio on audio, if you look at your completion rate in Spotify or in Apple podcasts, your goal is that 60% of people make it not only to the first 30 seconds, but through the whole episode. Very different. So keep that in mind that your Audio audience, you have a lot more leeway. You don't have to grab them, you still have to hook them in, but you don't need to so aggressively get them to stay, like you really need to do on YouTube. All right, so the fourth metric that we want to look at is average view duration. So if people are getting past your intro, but they're dropping off during the episode, what I found is that the problem is usually within the first five minutes of the episode, because if they make it through the intro, that means that they've fastened their seatbelt, they sit back, they're relaxing, they're here to enjoy the flight. And so the episode needs to actually start addressing whatever was promised in the packaging. Not after five minutes of pleasantries or. I'm so excited for this episode. So tell me about your background. Oh, my gosh, where was it that we met? You got to cut that stuff out. The first five minutes of whatever you publish in your podcast episode needs to immediately start pulling the thread of whatever you promise in the packaging. So if someone clicked on the video because the title promised something specific, and they're five minutes into the video and you still haven't started pulling the thread on that specific thing, and they're going to think that you bait and switched them and they're going to turn the video off. So within the first five minutes, you got to start pulling on the thread. Now, average view duration is also where the long form advantage of podcasting really shows up. So if you can get someone past the first five minutes and they're engaged, the watch time on a 60 minute episode is enormous because like we said, one person watching for an hour is worth more to the algorithm than 10 people watching a three minute video. But you have to earn those minutes, and that starts in the first five. Now, there's no single magic number for average view duration that you should shoot for. But I can tell you that from what I've seen an interview episode with an average view duration below 5 minutes, there's lots of problems. The intro's not there. It just. People really don't stick around. They don't get to the good stuff. The podcasts that I work with that are growing well tend to land in the 10 to 20 minute range for average view duration. That's what we shoot for. But more than you going after any specific number that I tell you now, average view duration is more of a game of playing against yourself. It's more like, what was your average duration on your last three videos? Okay, what can you do in your next three episodes to add 30 seconds to the AVD, what can you tweak to keep people a little longer next time? This is where it becomes a constant game of self improvement. And those incremental gains in AVD are what really compound into serious watch time. One other thing to note, if you're a podcaster that does both solo episodes and discussion episodes, your AVD on solo episodes is always going to be way lower than on guest episodes. And this is probably totally normal. This isn't a defect, that's not a problem. I really wouldn't compare the two and think that somehow they're wrong. They're just two very different types of content that perform to different standards. All right, so go ahead and look at your last 10 episodes on YouTube. If your impressions are low, your show either doesn't have a clear enough promise or you're picking topics that nobody wants and or YouTube just doesn't know who to show your content to. If your click through rate is below 3%, that means that people are seeing your content, but they're not clicking on it. And that's usually a problem with your titles and thumbnails. If your click through rate is fine, but your 30 second retention is below like 60 or 55%, that means people are clicking, but immediately turning the video off your intro is not doing its job. And if you have a solid 30 second retention but not a good average view duration, that means people are getting through the intro, but then they're dropping off early. And that usually means that your first five minutes doesn't start holding on the thread of the packaging that you promised and you have to get to the point faster. So those are four input metrics. And if your podcast isn't growing on YouTube, one of them is where your show is leaking. I would zone in on one of them and try and fix one of them at a time, rather than trying to fix all of them at the same time. Now I should note that those are the inputs if your outputs are views and subscribers. But for most business owners who are podcasting that I talk to, the ultimate output isn't really views and subscribers, it's revenue and sales. And even if you monetize through sponsorship, the question is still did people click on my sponsors links? Did they buy? Am I? Are they going to be a sponsor again? How many sales did I actually drive from this episode? So once you've got the YouTube inputs working, your impressions, your CTR, your retention and your AVD are in good shape. The funnel then extends into your business did you make a call to action in the episode? Okay, how many people clicked on the link in your description? How many of those people opted in or booked a call or actually bought your thing after that, that's when your normal business inputs and outputs tracking kicks in and the whole thing becomes one giant game from topic all the way down to purchase, where every piece is measurable and every piece can be improved week after week. Listen, every audience in every business is different. And my hope is that this helps you zone in on what to improve about your show. So to help you with this, I've actually created a four step diagnostic worksheet that you can download, print out, fill in to help guide you as you figure this out. So if you want that worksheet, go ahead to the link in the description and you can download that. And by the way, if you want my eyes on your show to get a deeper look at which of these metrics need to improve so you can turn your show into your strongest business marketing asset, click the link in the description. Book a podcast audit with me and we can dive into it together. All right, that's gonna do it for this episode. My name is Kev Michael. I am your podcast growth coach and this has been Grow the Sam.