Understanding Your Performance for Advertising Partners

Sponsorship deals are a cost-benefit exercise for advertising partners. If your channel metrics aren’t up to scratch, they won’t make an offer ­– no matter how promising your brand may seem. Understanding your performance is the first step to accessing this lucrative revenue stream.

At MinMxD, we help gaming studios and content creators to improve their income and digital content. In this article, we’ll offer insight into what performance metrics are, why they matter, how to find them, and how to convey them for the best chance at closing an advertising deal.

Want to improve your gaming channel’s revenue? Contact us today.

Channel performance metrics are all the stats that represent user engagement, retention, and growth for your channel. Depending on your platform, these can be a little different, but the main ones you’ll want to look at are:

• Average watch time
• Number of views
• Number of subscribers
• Subscriber growth
• Growth trends
• Ad revenue

Most of these performance metrics are incredibly useful when trying to win a sponsorship, as they show the potential audience your sponsor could reach with their ad – along with how that may change in the future for further partnerships down the line.

Your ad revenue is the only one of these that isn’t super important for your advertising partners, but it is useful for you in making a decision on whether or not to partner up. Not every sponsorship deal is a good one, and if you’re making enough with ad revenue to begin with, it’s worth considering whether the offer being made is right for you.

Good performance metrics mean your channel is healthy and growing, which is an important thing for any budding content creator – especially when you want to go full time.

However, these metrics have additional value when it comes to winning advertising partnerships, as they can display your worth in a number of different ways. This can lead to more and better deals, greatly impacting your potential revenue.

We’ll now go through some of the metrics we mentioned earlier, outlining why they’re important:

Watch Time

The average watch time of your videos or streams represents how engaged viewers are. If they’re dropping off early on, this might indicate you’re not getting into the action quickly enough. Advertisers will care about this, especially as their ads are often placed at the start of videos, so improving this metric is essential.

Views and Subscribers

These two metrics can go hand-in-hand, but sometimes drift apart from one another for one reason or another. Both are vital for advertisers, as they show how many people your video will likely reach ­– and therefore how much value you can offer them.

Theoretically, the more subscribers you have, the more views you should get, and vice versa. But the reality is that this isn’t always the case.

If you’re noticing a gap between your expected views and your actual, or in your number of subscribers compared to your views, consider what the factors could be. Have you taken a hiatus? Is your content inconsistent? Have you recently had something go viral, or are you just not pushing people to subscribe enough?

Subscriber Growth and Growth Trends

Subscriber growth refers to your monthly increase in subscribers, represented as a raw value. Your growth trend, on the other hand, shows how much your growth in subscribers has changed from month to month.

Ideally, you’ll want to be getting more and more subscribers each month as you get bigger. This helps you grow exponentially, ensuring you’re making the most of your successes.

If you’re noticing stable subscriber growth, that’s great! However, if the amount you grow each month isn’t increasing, you may need to do more in terms of content innovation and diversification, or just in plain marketing.

Now you know what performance metrics are and why they’re important to both your channel and your advertising partners, the next step is to find them.

Twitch and YouTube both have analytics studios you can go to that show the overall metrics for your channel. Additionally, you can look on a video-by-video basis to get deeper insight into how each individual piece of content is performing and impacting your overall stats.

On top of these basic resources, you might also find it helpful to use some third-party tools. These can give you even further insights, and potentially offer recommendations to lead to better content creation and enhanced growth metrics in the future.

Tools for Analysing Viewer and Gaming Performance

There are plenty of tools out there for both Twitch and YouTube that help you understand your performance metrics. Consider options like:

• TubeBuddy
• vidIQ
• Rival IQ
• Sprout Social

On top of these, you may also want to consider the SEO element of your YouTube channel. This involves optimising your content for search queries so you’re found by the right people, boosting the reach and relevance of your content.

Find out more about YouTube SEO in our recent article >

With your performance metrics safely in hand, the next step is to convince advertising partners that you’re worth sponsoring. Typically, an advertising partner will come to you first, requesting your metrics to ensure you’ll be the right fit. Once you find a deal you’re interested in, the next step is packaging the data for them to view.

Make sure to only include relevant stats. Adding in details like your advertising revenue will only confuse things, and may result in a worse deal.

Try to put a positive light on things if you can. Highlight your best performing videos, explain outlier statistics, and convey your channel growth and viewership in a clear, precise manner.

If you do all this – and your stats are up to scratch – then you’re sure to land a deal.

As an extra, you can identify additional opportunities to improve your content while you’re looking at your analytics. This form of data-driven content optimisation enables you to see where people are dropping off, what they’re most and least interested in, and how you need to balance your efforts between marketing and content production.

The results of this analysis will be vastly different from person to person, and you may find it difficult to decide on a direction. Working with the right partner is the best place to start.

Channel performance metrics are essential not only for landing potential advertising deals, but also for the continued growth and success of your channel. Without a good understanding of metrics, you’ll be flying in the dark when it comes to adapting your content to the wants and needs of your viewers.

At MinMxD, we shine a light on the way forward for your gaming content strategy. If you need support understanding or acting on your channel analytics, get in touch today ­– we’d be happy to help.

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