Hey guys, Nikhil here from OneWrk!

If you've caught me on LinkedIn, you probably know I run a YouTube agency and a bunch of our own YouTube channels. We’re constantly in the weeds with data, trying to figure out what makes a video pop.

Today, I want to do something a little different. I’m going to pull back the curtain and break down the analytics of one of our most successful videos. This specific video, a review on our channel Home Banao, has reached about 770,000 views since we uploaded it.

I'll walk you through exactly how we look at the data, what metrics we focus on, and how we use these insights to make our next video even better. It’s all about that cycle of constant improvement.

So, let's get straight into it.

Getting Started: Inside the YouTube Studio

First things first, whenever you're analyzing a video, your home base is the YouTube Studio. For this breakdown, we’re looking at a review of the Chromecast dongle.

Here's the channel content page. We're diving into the Chromecast review video with 770k views.

To get to the good stuff, we just click on the "Analytics" button for that specific video.

The Overview: Your High-Level Dashboard

Once you click in, you land on the Overview tab. This gives you the big-picture numbers.

The main dashboard for our video's analytics.

For this video, the key stats are:

  • Views: 770.3K

  • Watch time (Hours): 34.0K

  • Subscribers: +5.4K

  • Estimated revenue: ₹26,025.14

These numbers are great, but the real magic happens when we dig deeper.

The Most Important Metric: Audience Retention

This is the part where I love spending my time. The Audience Retention graph is a goldmine. It tells you exactly how engaging your video is, moment by moment.

This graph is crucial. It shows where viewers are engaged and where they drop off.

For this 9-minute video, we have:

  • Average view duration: 2:39

  • Average percentage viewed: 28.3%

This means, on average, a viewer watches about 28% of the video. But what's even more telling is the shape of the graph. You can hover over it to see exactly what percentage of your viewers are still watching at any given second.

For example, I can see that only 9% of viewers made it to the very end.

You might also notice little bumps or spikes in the graph. This doesn't mean new people joined mid-way! It means people are re-watching or skipping back to a specific part, which is a great signal that a particular section was really valuable.

Advanced Analytics: The Real Secrets

This is where it gets really fun. If you click on "SEE MORE" under the retention graph, you open up a whole new world of data.

1. Comparing Your Video to Others

This is a powerful feature. You can compare your video's retention to other, similarly-lengthed videos across all of YouTube.

Our video (blue line) performed above average for the first 4 minutes, which is a great sign.

As you can see, our video was "Above average" for the first four minutes. This tells me the first half of the video was really strong. My job as a creator is to keep that line above average for as long as possible.

2. Subscriber vs. Non-Subscriber Behavior

You can also segment the retention graph to see how subscribers behave differently from non-subscribers.

If you're building a community, you want to see a bigger gap here, with your subscribers sticking around much longer. For an informational channel like ours, the lines are pretty close, which makes sense.

Reach: How Did People Find the Video?

The Reach tab tells you how your video is being discovered.

This video got 8.5 million impressions (times YouTube showed the thumbnail) with a 7.6% click-through rate (CTR). That's a solid CTR, which tells me the thumbnail and title worked well together.

The top traffic sources were:

  • Browse features (80.1%): This is the YouTube homepage, subscription feed, etc. A high number here is fantastic—it means YouTube is actively pushing your video to people.

  • Suggested videos (9.6%): Your video appearing next to or after other videos.

  • YouTube search (7.4%): People finding your video by searching for specific keywords.

Diving deeper, you can see the exact YouTube search terms that brought people in, like "chromecast," "google chromecast," and even "google tv stick." This is invaluable for understanding what topics to cover next.

Audience: Who is Watching?

The Audience tab gives you a clear picture of your viewers.

Here are some surprising (and not-so-surprising) insights for this video:

  • Gender: 96.7% Male. A lot of tech and home improvement content skews this way.

  • Age: The 25-44 age bracket makes up nearly 60% of my audience. This makes sense; they're the ones with the purchasing power for a product like this.

  • Geography: 94.9% from India, which is expected since the video is in Hindi.

  • Watch time from subscribers: This is a humbling metric for me! 99.1% of my watch time came from people who are not subscribed. It's a great indicator that I'm finding a new audience, but a terrible indicator of my ability to convert them into subscribers. A clear sign I need better call-to-actions in my videos!

Revenue: The Money Talk

Finally, the Revenue tab.

This video made about ₹26,000 (around $310) from AdSense. Now, here's the thing about YouTube revenue: unless you are in a very high-CPM niche (like finance or software) or getting tens of millions of views, relying solely on AdSense just doesn't work out.

For this video, advertisers paid about ₹87 ($1) for every 1,000 views (CPM), and out of that, my share (RPM) was about ₹33 (less than $0.50).

The real money for a channel like this comes from other sources. For this video, we had an affiliate link in the description. Even if we only sold 10-15 Chromecasts from that link, we would have made far more money than we did from AdSense.

That's why understanding your entire monetization strategy is key, not just the ad revenue.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it! A complete, transparent breakdown of how a single video performs on YouTube.

By looking at these analytics—from retention and reach to audience demographics and revenue sources—you get a powerful perspective on what's working and what's not. This is how you learn, refine, and grow.

Hope this gave you a better perspective! If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you in the next one