This document tracks all the KPIs and sub-KPIs that we hypothesize will get us to our ultimate goal of a certain number of YouTube subscribers on 

. With this spreadsheet, we were trying to gather a bunch of data points about our videos to determine which of them made the most impact on subscriber growth. Ultimately, we found that average view duration and clickthrough rate (CTR) were the biggest drivers—and title, topic, and thumbnail had the biggest impact on those two top-level metrics.

We used to upload three videos a week. But when we actually looked at the data, we found that if we only did one to two videos a month, our subscriber growth per video was higher.

Each week, we want to know if we’re on pace toward our monthly goal. If not, we need to think deeper about our outputs to make sure we get back on pace by the end of the year. We’ve noticed that it's much better to have smaller, more incremental targets rather than going from zero to 500k. With monthly pacing, we can focus on getting to 100k, then 200k, and then 300k. We ended up growing even faster that way because we weren’t stressed about hitting our ambitious end-of-year targets.

Through weekly tracking and testing titles, thumbnails, and scripts, it led us to get to a formula where now most of our videos reliably get over a million views. This checklist shows how we made that formula repeatable.

By tracking our most popular videos, we're looking for commonalities we can identify between them. What we're really trying to do is identify the 1-3 templates for successful videos that we can repeat, using these metrics to benchmark.

We tracked longer videos cause that's what seemed to drive the most subscriptions.

We tested different CTAs to see if that would increase our subscriber count. It turned out that changing the CTA didn’t matter as much as whether people actually watched the video. Generally, if people watched a video, they would subscribe.

Noah Kagan

We use this spreadsheet to capture key data points on our videos to determine which ones are the biggest drivers of subscriber growth. This weekly tracking enabled us to grow our channel year over year.

Weekly KPIs at OkDork

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