How to Audit and Optimize a YouTube Channel

Published on 01.04.2026 by Chizoba T

When growing a YouTube channel, most creators focus on the number of views and subscribers they get. If these numbers look good and are growing steadily, they feel that they are hacking it, and their YouTube channel is doing well. While these are arguably the most important metrics, looking at them alone may not give a clear picture of your channel's performance.

For instance, you may see a growing number of views, but your average view rate is dropping, indicating that people are losing interest in your content. That is why you need to understand how to conduct a YouTube audit to see what is working and what isn't. In this article, we provide you with everything you need to conduct a YouTube channel audit. We also provide some actionable tips on optimizing your channel after the audit.

What is a YouTube Channel Audit?

A YouTube channel audit is a step-by-step evaluation of your channel's performance, content, and analytics to determine what is working and what isn't. It involves analyzing your YouTube SEO, thumbnails, and engagement metrics to increase your channel's views and subscribers.

Statistics indicate that at least 500 hours of content are updated on YouTube every minute. Another report suggests that 70% of YouTube viewers use the platform for more educational purposes, such as watching product reviews before buying or watching step-by-step guides to installing software.

That means the competition on YouTube can be stiff. If you want your brand to stand out and stay ahead of the competition, you need to review your channel's performance to determine whether it's achieving its objective. Doing that can provide insights into your channel's performance and help you identify opportunities for YouTube marketing, especially when combined with video testimonials to offer social proof.

When growing a YouTube channel, you need your viewers to take action, such as subscribing. If you are using the channel to market your business, you want them to take an action, such as visiting your site. A YouTube audit will help you determine the effectiveness of your channel in prompting people to take the desired action.

Importance of a YouTube Channel Audit

If you are wondering whether auditing your YouTube channel is worth the effort, here are some good reasons to consider:

  • Get insights into KPIs. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for YouTube channels help you evaluate the performance of your YouTube videos and channels. Analyzing these KPIs will provide insights into your video's performance and whether your strategy is working. By measuring KPIs, you can improve the performance of your YouTube content. The better the performance, the higher the visibility. When you understand the performance of your current videos, you can leverage the data to make your videos appear at the top of the SERPs.
  • Uncover hidden opportunities. By analyzing the quality of your videos, engagement metrics, and SEO, you can uncover hidden opportunities.
  • Get insights into audience behavior. YouTube analytics will provide insights into what keeps your viewers hooked and what makes them click away.
  • Perform better than the competition. You can use a YouTube audit to understand your competitors’ strategies and refine your content to outperform theirs.
  • Eradicate technical roadblocks. A YouTube audit will help you find the issues that make your content perform poorly, such as weak titles, descriptions, and tags that hurt your visibility.
  • Perform data-driven decisions. You can create content that aligns with YouTube best practices and your audience’s preferences.

Step-by-Step Guide on Conducting a YouTube Channel Audit

To have an effective YouTube channel audit, follow these steps:

Understand Your Goals

Before you begin your YouTube channel audit, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve with the YouTube channel. You can set tangible goals, such as increasing views or subscribers, or increasing engagement (e.g., comments, likes, and shares). You can also have intangible goals, such as using YouTube for lead generation. After understanding your goal, you can break it down into actionable insights.

For instance, if you aim to grow your subscriber base by 30% over the next three months, you should consider the steps you will take to achieve that. For instance, you might want to optimize video descriptions and titles, and to improve the quality of your videos. By understanding your goals and quantifying them, you can make them more realistic and easier to track your progress.

Understanding your KPIs will make it easier to measure your success. Some of the KPIs to consider are:

  • Subscriber growth rate. An indicator of the speed at which your channel is gaining subscribers.
  • Average view duration. A good metric for showing whether your audience is watching your videos to the end.
  • Engagement rate. Shows the frequency with which viewers like, comment on, or share videos.

These KPIs will provide benchmarks for measuring the growth rate of your channels. It will ensure the channel audit aligns with the channel's vision.

Dig Deeper Into Your Channel Performance

Once you understand your goals and target audience, you can dig deeper into your channel's performance, focusing on overall growth. Some of the things to consider are:

Subscriber Growth Trends

Instead of just looking at your subscriber numbers, pay attention to the growth rate of the subscriber. At times, your channel may gain 500 subscribers in one month, which may look good on paper, but in reality, subscriber growth may have slowed compared to the previous month.

When you realize your channel's subscriber growth has slowed, it may indicate that your content is becoming outdated or that the algorithm has downgraded your ranking. If you find that you are losing more subscribers than you are gaining, pay attention to the video that may be causing this. Take time to also observe the videos that are bringing in the most subscribers under the Audience tab to determine what is working and what isn't.

Check the Watch Time Patterns and View Velocity

View velocity refers to the speed at which your videos receive views immediately after publishing. If your videos keep viewers on the platform for long, YouTube will reward them with a better ranking. Pay attention to the area where viewers are dropping off to understand why viewers are losing interest. You can also look at the areas driving the highest retention to replicate them.

Analyze Your Engagement

Determine whether your views are active or passive by examining the engagement rate. Some of the metrics to help you understand if your content is resonating with its target audience are:

  • Comments, likes, and video shares.
  • Thumbnail click-through rate. This metric shows the impressions that become views.

Here is the interpretation of the engagement rate when conducting a YouTube audit:

  • A dropping engagement rate. This shows your content no longer resonates with the target audience. You might want to refresh it to make it more engaging.
  • Low CTR. This shows your titles and thumbnails aren't quite compelling and don't hook your audience.
  • Consistent patterns in audience drop off. When you realize there is a particular point at which your audience is dropping off, you need to analyze the reason, especially if it occurs within the first 30 seconds.
  • Average view duration. If this is less than half the video, it shows that while people are clicking on the content, they also leave quickly. The content doesn't hook them well.
  • Stagnant subscriber growth. If there is growth for some months, it shows that the people viewing don't subscribe. Therefore, you might want to add a strong call to action.

Pay Attention to the Content Performance

Instead of focusing more on how the channel is doing, consider the performance of the content, paying attention to the patterns that consistently get good responses and those that fail. Some content consistently performs well, while other content performs poorly, and you need to find out why. When conducting a content audit, pay attention to the entire history of your content performance. 

Look at all your videos to find the best-performing ones, the poorly performing ones, and dig deeper into the causes. What did your audience enjoy that helped them better receive the video? Ask yourself several questions, such as:

  • Which of your content is consistently performing well? Are they Shorts or YouTube long videos?
  • What video length is bringing the best results? Is it 1, 5, or over 10 minutes?
  • How well are the collaborations performing compared to the solo content?
  • Are the well-produced content performing better?

Title and Thumbnail Analysis

While the title and thumbnail may seem like minor elements, they have a significant impact on your video's performance. This is because the title and description play an important role in YouTube SEO. The title should include the target keywords and align with the user's search intent, so you appear for the right search terms.

A good YouTube title and thumbnail should capture your audience's attention within a few minutes. YouTube suggests that the best-performing videos are usually those with customized thumbnails, as these are more likely to prompt viewers to click. One YouTube feature you can use to improve your thumbnails is Thumbnail AB testing. When auditing the title and thumbnail, you should do the following:

  • Check whether the visual identity is consistent across thumbnails. Is there a recurring theme among the top-performing videos?
  • Check what is working and what isn't regarding the CTR. Do you notice any patterns among the videos with the highest CTRs, such as text placement, font, colors, or contrast?

Conduct a YouTube Short performance Analysis

YouTube Shorts should not be regarded as snippets of your current long-form videos. These are a different format used for other purposes, helping expose your channel to different audiences, test different hook formats, and boost the channel's visibility.  

Remember that YouTube Shorts operate differently from TikTok or Reels. That means creating a YouTube Short of a trending TikTok video doesn't mean it will go viral because the YouTube Short algorithm is different. You should, therefore, ensure you create platform-specific YouTube Shorts rather than recycling short videos from TikTok and Instagram.

When conducting a YouTube Short audit, you should pay attention to:

  • Views. How many views does each short receive? This should be higher than that of the long-form content, usually by 10 or 20 times.
  • Engagement. In most cases, this is lower than that of the long-form content.

Conduct an Audience Analysis

No matter the social media campaign you are running, it's always important to begin by understanding your audience. Otherwise, if you are targeting the wrong people, you will struggle to achieve the desired results. You need to note that your YouTube audience consists of people with different patterns, behaviors, and discovery patterns.

There are different ways to reach your audience. One of these is by looking at the data of your current customers. The people already watching your videos or buying your products or services are a good representation of your target audience, and therefore, it is always a good idea to begin there. Consider if the demographic data shows you are reaching your targeted audience or if there is a disconnect.

When analyzing the audience demographic data, you should pay attention to:

  • The age. Is your content reaching Gen Zs or millennials?
  • Gender. Provides insights into the language to use in your videos.
  • Subtitle languages.

Remember that people subscribe to your YouTube channel because of its content. If you are creating a podcast or a talking video, the value of the content is what people value.  That is unlike platforms like Instagram or TikTok, where people may follow you because of your personality. Therefore, you should prioritize the interests of your demographic.

Pay attention to the viewer behavior patterns by analyzing data such as:

Traffic Sources

The source of your views can be from different sources, such as:

  • External. These are the views from other social media platforms, direct links, or websites. This can be a good indicator of how well you are promoting the content outside the platform.
  • Direct. If most of your views are coming from direct sources, it shows that your SEO strategy is working and that people are finding your content through search queries.
  • Browse features. This indicates that your titles and thumbnails are working, as people are clicking through from the subscription feed or homepage.
  • Suggested videos. If this is your source of views, it shows that the YouTube algorithm recommends your content alongside that of other related videos.

If all your views come from a single source, you should optimize that source while also diversifying your sources.

Conduct a YouTube SEO Audit

YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google, conducting over 3 billion searches every day. The good news is that search traffic often compounds over time. That means even a video that receives only 50 views in its first month can easily reach 5K views in three months.

With the traffic from search engines being free, there is no reason you shouldn't capitalize on it. The first step should be to analyze the performance of your current videos in search results. Where is most of your traffic coming from? Are the views from search growing or shrinking? Are you ranking for your target keywords?

Pay attention to the metadata of the video. These are the title, descriptions, and tags. Make sure the primary keyword is added in the first 40 characters or the title. The YouTube algorithm pays more attention to the first 150 characters in the description, and is a good place to add the primary keyword and a short description of what you do. You should also add 5-8 tags that vary from the primary keywords and the title. Here are other tips when performing a YouTube SEO audit:

  • Optimize your captions. YouTube can read captions to better understand what a video is about. Therefore, you should rely on the auto-captions and ensure you fix all necessary details, such as brand names, acronyms, and numbers.
  • Ad time stamps and end screens. YouTube displays timestamps in search results, so you should add them to your videos. You can also use end screens to link your videos to others on your channel.
  • Conduct keyword research.  You can conduct a YouTube search to see the videos appearing at the top for your target keywords. These can also help you to identify content gaps and trending topics. You can dig deeper into the keywords your channel is ranking for using tools such as Google Trends.
  • Organize videos into playlists. Ensure that your videos are organized into playlists, with each playlist given a title and descriptions with the right keywords. You can add a channel trailer to the channel's description, along with relevant keywords and links to improve your channels’ discoverability.

A good rule of thumb would be to conduct a Youtube SEO analysis every month. You can then refresh the descriptions of your top-performing videos and, where necessary, add the right thumbnails and timestamps. Check for red flags, such as a drop in search impressions. This could be an indicator of what you need to work on.

Conduct a Competitor Analysis

YouTube competitor analysis will provide important insights into how your content and channel stack up against the competition. It will show you if there are important keywords and trends you may be missing. Pay attention to the top-performing video metric to determine if there is an area where your competitors are performing better than you, at par with them, or ahead of them.

Check the subscriber growth rate to see if your competitors are gaining followers faster than you are. You can check your subscriber growth rate and compare it with those of two or three competitors with a similar audience. You should analyze:

  • Are competitors growing faster than you are, and what kinds of content are you publishing?
  • What is their publishing frequency and posting time?
  • How do their subscription CTAs stack up against yours?

Another metric you need to analyze when conducting YouTube competitor analysis is the average views per video. You can use third-party tools such as SocialInsider to get this data. Analyze the average view for your industry and check their engagement rate compared to yours as well. Do they have more interactive audiences compared to yours? If the answer is yes, check what they are doing better than you.

  • How fast are they responding to comments?
  • Are they adding a strong CTA to drive engagement in their comments sections?
  • What social media channels are they using to drive engagement even further?

YouTube Content Gap Analysis

The content gap analysis can be a great way to identify untapped opportunities by looking at the topics your competitors aren't covering. Again, you can use third-party tools to identify content that is working for your competitors but not for you. Pay attention if there are differentiation opportunities. For instance, if you find that your competitors are creating technical content, you can try leveraging emotional storytelling. Some of the ways to discover differentiation opportunities are:

  • Considering whether it's possible to change the presentation opportunities and include a more formal or casual tone compared to your competitor?
  • If you find competitors creating shallow content, go deeper.
  • Is there an opportunity to create some YouTube shorts on topics that your competitors are creating?

Keep analyzing what content gaps you can fill.

Compare Cross-Platform Performances

A 2025 OnMedia Consumer Survey report indicated that 92% of the TikTok audience also visit YouTube every month. This can indicate that your TikTok audience overlaps with your YouTube audience. When you understand where the same content performs differently, you can identify each platform's strengths and optimize your resource allocation.

For instance, you might find that you have 5 times more followers on TikTok than on YouTube. Therefore, you can leverage TikTok for brand awareness. On the other hand, you can use YouTube for conversion. However, avoid duplicating your TikTok content on YouTube. Instead, make sure you create content with each algorithm in mind, as the way people consume content on TikTok differs from that on YouTube.

Use the Insights to Optimize Your Channel

After spending many hours collecting and analyzing YouTube data, you need to optimize your findings. Remember that some of your findings will be more valuable than others. Therefore, you might have to do some minor tweaks in some of your findings, while others may require a complete overhaul of your strategy.

In Conclusion

A YouTube channel audit can provide insights into whether your YouTube channel strategy is working. It will provide insights into the performance of your content, your channel, and your competitors. You can then use that data to improve your channel and content performance. Therefore, go ahead and follow the steps above to conduct a YouTube channel audit. We recommend you read our guide on how creators can turn short videos into long-term subscription revenue.