I’ve been waiting for this YouTube change for over 10 years.

YouTube finally added a very small, but very important feature in Analytics.

We can now use playlists to analyze content. This will change the way you think of not only playlists, but also your content. Opening doors to analyze your videos in powerful new ways.

Here’s what you need to know.

Before.

If you went into YouTube analytics to look at the stats of your playlists, YouTube would show you how many views that playlist got. This means the number of times people clicked play on that playlist and how far down the playlist people watched.

It would show you nothing about the actual videos inside the playlist.

…That isn’t overly useful for most people.

Before this update, if you wanted to see how the videos inside the playlists are performing, you’d have to…

1. go into the Advanced mode of YouTube Analytics.
2. Click on the most obscure section possible and create a Group.
3. Search and manually add videos to that Group.
4. Then select the Group to see the analytics of that group of videos.
5. Every time a new video was uploaded, you’d have to repeat step 3 to add it to the Group manually.

It was not great, and very few people even knew this was a thing.

But now!

With playlists giving proper analytics on the videos inside the playlist, you can…

1. Go to Analytics > Content, and select Playlists.
2. Enjoy the stats of all the videos in that playlist AND see how many people clicked play on the playlist
3. Optional: click on the Playlist to get a detailed breakdown of the content in it

It’s beautiful, wonderful, and helpful in many ways.

Why this matters, and how you can use this to grow your channel.

One of the most obvious ways to grow a channel is by understanding what’s working – but there’s a sneaky, less obvious understanding that’s even more important.

Let me explain.

Example one (the more obvious one)

Let’s say you have a cooking channel, and I asked you, “What type of videos got more views last month? Breakfast recipes or dinner recipes? Are pasta videos more popular than soup videos?”

Previously, the only way to answer that would be by clicking around and manually checking videos.

Now, with this new playlist analytics, that cooking creator knows the exact answer. They can see that the videos inside the dinner playlist got 100,000 views last month, and that the videos in the breakfast playlist got 30,000 views.

This is crucial information to understand how videos are performing long-term and what’s currently working on your channel.

But that’s only part of it.

Example two (the sneaky, less obvious one)

We all experiment with different tactics. Now, we can properly track them and answer important questions that can be the catalyst for incredible growth.

1. Are my videos with longer descriptions performing better? Are they appearing in search results more often than videos with short descriptions?
2. Do I get more subscribers by asking at the beginning of the video, the middle, or the end – or not at all?
3. Does this new format, where I introduce the video differently, have better watch time and retention than the old style?

Knowing this kind of information can bring a channel to another level.

What you need to do, right now.

1. Check out Analytics > Content, and select Playlist. Which playlists had the best and worst-performing content last month?
2. If you’re not already, use playlists to break up your content into useful groups such as genre, topic, and even sub-topics (like in Example One above).
3. Use playlists to start running experiments and tests. Try two new styles of intros and put each style into a new private playlist. Find videos with long vs short descriptions and group them in playlists. Go crazy. Even try playlisting low-effort and high-effort videos and see if it’s worth the time investment.

and 4) Let us know in the Canadian Creator Community what your playlist stats are.

Here’s that cooking channel.

Bread recipes have the highest total views on the channel, but now, with this data, we can see that the meat videos are what’s actually bringing more growth to the channel. Even more growth than the larger bread videos.

Incredibly helpful info.

Use it, change the game.

PS: You can read more about the change to Playlist reporting on YouTube’s support page here.