How to Use YouTube Studio in 2026! (Complete Guide)

0:00If you've just started a YouTube channel, one of the most important tools that you're going to need on your YouTube journey is your back-end YouTube studio. This is how you upload videos and monitor all of the content in your library and track video performance across all of your catalog. So, in this video, I'm going to show you everything you need to know about your YouTube studio as a beginner and show you the most important analytics that you can start tracking. So, if you're on the homepage of YouTube, just click your icon in the top right corner and then

0:25scroll down to the YouTube Studio. That's the fastest way to open up your YouTube Studio from the YouTube homepage. And immediately you'll be opened up to the YouTube Studio dashboard. And this is just a quick glance at a bunch of random notifications, achievements, a glance at your analytics, and even your latest video performance. If you uploaded a short or a long form video, that will be over here on the top left. So, this is just a quick glance page, but honestly, I don't spend much time here in the dashboard page. A lot of the most important information is over here on this left column in terms of content,

0:58analytics, and more. So, let's start with this content tab. If I click on the content tab, this is where you'll see all of the content that you've uploaded for your YouTube channel. You can see all of your long form videos with this tab right here. If I scroll, you can just see an endless amount of content

1:12that we've uploaded here at Think Media. If you get to the bottom, you can actually filter rows per page up to 50 rows per page. So now I can see 50 pieces of content per scroll before I have to go to the next page. So this is where you view all of your long form horizontal uploads. If you are a vertical shorts creator, there's a dedicated tab where you can view your shorts. So you can click this tab right here. And now I'm able to see all of the shorts uploads on the Think Media channel. And you can also see the visibility of the short. Has it been set

1:40to public or is it a private or unlisted short? as well as the date that it's been published and the current view count as well as estimated revenue and the amount of comments that piece of content has. And there's a ton of different tabs here. There's like live streams. If you've gone live before,

1:55this is where your live streams will be. There's different community tab posts. If you do post to the community tab, those posts will be available here. Playlist that you can manage. All of these different tabs you can cycle through to view all of the content on your channel. Now, if you wanted to upload a new piece of content, at the very top right of the screen is the create button. You can just click that button and you have a few different options. You can upload a video, go live, create a new community tab, post, playlist, podcast, course or show. So all of these options, the most common

2:23one though that we want to encourage you to get familiar with is the upload videos. Here at Think Media, we encourage you punch fear in the face and start uploading content. If you're a brand new channel, this is especially important for you to start building momentum. And if you want some help growing your channel and even posting your first few videos, we're always running free challenges here at Think

2:41Media that you can get involved with. I'll link one down in the description below. That'll be a great fit for you. If you're uploading videos, you can just drag a video directly into this upload interface, and then just in a couple seconds or two, you'll be able to walk through all of the details of that upload, including the title of the video, the key description for everything. And you can see here we actually have a preset description that I'll show you in just a second that you can have some upload defaults for your channel for which saves you a lot of time. We love doing this. There's all of

3:08these different things that you'll want to fill out. Is the content uh does it include a paid promotion? We would say no for this video. Brand partnerships. You just want to fill out all these things. If you're able to monetize your channel, you could select on for monetization. and just go through all of these prompts and get them filled out so that you can hit save and make sure if you don't want your video to go live right away, make sure it's set to unlisted or private. But that's how you

3:30upload a video from the YouTube studio. After you upload a video, you can always change the details of that video later as well. So, if I grab this little pencil icon on the screen for this video, I can edit the details of the video, including things like changing my title if I wanted to try a new title. There's also a feature called AB testing if you want to test multiple video packages. So you maybe want to test a different thumbnail or a different title later down the road. You can do this all here within your YouTube studio, which is a cool feature. When you're ready for

4:00a video to go live, you just need to change the visibility of that video to public. And once you do this and hit save, your video will be live for the world to see. So make sure it's completely optimized and ready to be published. If you don't want your video to be live and you're working on the description and the back end and maybe the title and thumbnail a little bit, you want to make sure it's either set to unlisted or private. Now, if you want to save yourself some time when you're uploading videos to YouTube, you can dive into your backend settings. So, just click that icon in the lower left

4:28corner and then go to upload defaults. So, this allows you to change the default settings for every time you import a video into YouTube. It will be able to have some preset options for you to save you time. Like right here, we have a description that's already pre-built, and it's sort of a template that we'll use and just adjust the settings and the chapter markers in the description based on what that specific video is about, but that saves us a ton of time so we don't have to rebuild the description from scratch every single video. You can set the visibility of videos that you upload to a default

5:00setting. So, we've selected unlisted as our default. You could also select private. I would not encourage you though to select public. So, go ahead and change this if you haven't changed it already to private or unlisted so that anytime you upload a new video and hit save, your video doesn't go live right away cuz you're probably still doing some packaging things for that video. And while you're on this interface, another important thing to double check is click on this channel tab right here and then go over to feature eligibility. And we need to make sure that all of these advanced features are enabled so that we can actually do a

5:32bunch of different things inside of YouTube and not be limited. So standard features should be enabled for any account that's created. But intermediate features such as creating custom thumbnails, which is really important. You don't want just autogenerated thumbnails, as well as live streaming and uploading videos longer than 15 minutes all require you to verify your phone number. So you need to make sure that you do this as soon as you can in your channel setup so that you can enable some of these intermediate features. And then the advanced features are also really important like appealing ID content claims or embedding live streams or AB testing of titles and

6:07thumbnails. These are also really important features. And how you enable these advanced features are one of these three options. So you have to do a video verification which just takes a couple minutes. Upload a valid ID or have a channel history that's long enough to enable that advanced verification. So if you're just getting your channel set up, make sure you enable these advanced features. It will save you a ton of headache down the road. Now, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about analytics. And this is one of the most powerful things that our YouTube studio has access to, which is robust analytics about our videos performance and the way

6:39that our audience is engaging with our content. So, if you quickly want to access the analytics for a particular video on your content feed, you can just grab any one of these videos, hover over the video, and you can click this little chart that says analytics. If you click that button, it'll very quickly open up the analytics for that particular piece of content. And at a glance, it'll give you a basic overview of the view counts, of the watch time, of subscribers, and revenue at a glance. This is really great to see off the bat. On the right side of the screen, you'll also see real-time views. So, how many people

7:11have watched this video in the last 48 hours? Well, this specific video I made is getting about 1,700 views every 48 hours. or you can click this little drop down arrow and see how the video has performed in the last hour. 43 people have watched this video. Now, if you want to look at a specific time duration of your video's performance, you can come up here and instead of selecting since published, which will show you analytics for the entire lifetime of that video, you could select a certain duration. Like you want to just see what it's done in the last 7 days. I could click last 7 days. And you can see that

7:43it's actually slowing down a little bit from its initial performance. We're getting 31% less views than the last 7 days. And this could show you maybe traffic is slowing on a piece of content that performed really well at the beginning of the content's life, but maybe the search volume is decreased on this video, which is causing the slowdown of performance. These are all interesting things to know. Or you could look at even the first 24 hours of performance. How did this video perform initially with your core audience who saw this video most likely first? And these are all just analytics from the overview tab. There's all of these other

8:15tabs that are really insightful as well. If you click on reach, this will give you great information about how many people are actually seeing your video and have the opportunity to click in the first place. These are what we call impressions. So, this video has over a million impressions, which means over a million people have had the opportunity to click. But the click-through rate, which sometimes we call this the CTR, click-through rate, is about 4.9% or close to 5%, which honestly is not that bad of a click-through rate. And as you skim through this timeline, you can see how the click-through rate has done over time. And the average of these

8:50click-through rates are 4.9%. Now, if you would go and change the thumbnail or the title, let's say it's like day, it's day 42 of this video being active. I could go change the title and thumbnail and monitor the click-through rate and see if performance increased or decreased. And that could tell me if I found a better title or thumbnail that's resonating with more people. If you scroll down a little bit, you can see how viewers are finding your video. And 58% of the people who watch this video find it from the browse feature. So maybe just on their homepage, they see the title and thumbnail and they find,

9:23hey, this looks kind of interesting. So 58% of the traffic comes from those kinds of clicks. And then you can see the other types suggested on the sidebar or the YouTube search bar. People are maybe searching for content like FX3 versus R6V. 15% roughly of people are finding this video off of search results. It all kind of depends on the types of videos that you're making where that traffic is going to come from the most. Now, if we go over to the engagement tab, we can also see some interesting information about how our content is retaining people for longer view durations. So, the first thing you'll see is overall watch time in

10:00hours. So, this video has over 6,000 hours of cumulative watch time. But honestly, a more interesting metric to me is average view duration. So, this is the amount of time somebody is actually spending watching the content. So, this video is a 19minute video, but the average length of time somebody spends watching this video is just under 5 minutes. If you scroll down just a little bit more, you can see information about your audience retention. And to me, this is one of the most powerful analytics in the entire YouTube studio because this really tells you how your storytelling and how your content is retaining people. YouTube really cares

10:34about the amount of time that people are spending on the platform. So, us as creators, it's our responsibility to try to retain people as long as possible with good storytelling techniques and not having a bunch of fluff in our videos and just having really dialed in content. So, we can see again for this video, the average view duration is 4 minutes and 55 seconds, which is only about 25% of the video, which is a little bit unfortunate. As I look at myself, I would like to see that number closer to like 35 or 40% and get people interested for a longer duration. If you scroll down just a little bit longer

11:06too, you can see something called your retention graph. And these retention graphs are really valuable because this is a visual representation of where people are engaging with the video and where they're kind of disengaged. So we can see right here as I'm talking about photography and megapixels, there's actually quite a big retention dip at this section right here. I'll highlight that on screen. So I can tell that people aren't super interested in the photo capabilities of two cinema

11:31cameras. That makes sense, right, Craig? So, why did you spend so much time talking about the photography in megapixels of these cameras? That doesn't make a lot of sense. And I could have shortened that section. And if we look a little closer, we can see a bit of a spike right after this section. And this is the low light performance comparison of these cameras. So, people are interested which one of these cameras actually performs better in low light. That's one of the reasons why people came to watch this video in the first place. So, these retention graphs can be a great learning tool to understand how can I improve some of my

11:59storytelling and remove sections that people are disinterested in. And this is the tool for understanding that. It's called your retention graph. Now, there's a couple more tabs that you could explore for individual videos. There's an audience tab that shows you kind of the audience behavior. What are the types of viewers who are watching your videos? Are they new viewers? Are they kind of casual viewers? They watch every once in a while or are they regular consistent viewers? And we can see the distribution for this video right here. You can also see the type of

12:25device that people were watching from. And a lot of people are watching this video on their computer or phone. Not a lot of people are watching in front of their TV. So, you can learn some insights about the way that viewers are engaging with your content based on the type of device that they're actually watching from. And then this last tab is revenue. And this is just information about the video's performance in terms of AdSense revenue. Now, there's a lot of other things you could do for individual videos. like you could click this comments button where you could see all of the different individual comments of that specific video and respond to

12:54community members right away. There's also a built-in editor inside of YouTube. But when you upload a YouTube video, there's not a whole lot you can do after the fact in terms of post-production other than sort of removing sections. If you said something that was like incorrect, you could take it out of the video, but then the video

13:10is going to jump at that little section. So, just be aware of that. If you try to use this built-in editor, things might get a little jumpy, but it is nice to have access to some simple adjustments even after you upload your video. Now, if we back out of that individual video, you can also view the analytics for your entire channel as a whole, which is really helpful for understanding your overall performance over a longer period of time. In this basic overview tab, you can get some analytics on the view counts, your watch time, your subscribers, and even estimated revenue over a set duration. So, over the last

13:4228 days is the duration, we've made $13,000 in ad revenue, grown the channel by 15,000 subscribers, and done over 3.8 million views across the channel as a whole. Over on the right side is again that real time tracker. It tracks a live count of your subscriber counts as well as real-time views in the last 48 hours. So, you can take a look at that at a glance. And there's some more information. Your top content during this period is really cool to see. But one of the most underutilized features I think for beginner channels is this tiny little button up here. It's called the advanced mode. And this is by far one of

14:14the most powerful tools in all of the YouTube studio. So if you click into advanced mode, this will open up sort of like a top-down master view of all of your content library and the performance of your whole library over a set duration. So if I wanted to view maybe the last quarter of the year, so the last 90 days from April to July, how has performance been on the channel? Well, we can see at a glance we've done over 12 million views. Watch time is really high. Subscribers 44,000 subs. Revenue $44,000. And our average clickthrough rate and impressions are also available to see. Now, if I wanted to add more

14:48metrics to this table, you could just click this plus button. Maybe I actually wanted to remove like impressions. I don't really care about impressions, but I want to add the average view duration into this set. I can hit apply. And now it's going to adjust accordingly. And now I see average view duration. Now there are like endless amounts of filters you could add to if you want to get ultra specific and analyze a certain batch of content. One of the favorite things I like to do because we produce a

15:14lot of long form and short form. Sometimes the data can get muddied because we don't know if shorts performance is outperforming or long form. So if we click content type as the filter type, I can choose videos and that will filter and just show me long form videos. And now I can look at this entire data set over the last 28 days and try to find trends as to what kind of breakthrough performance we've had on our long- form videos. So this advanced mode for analyzing performance of your videos is one of the hidden gems of YouTube. I feel like not enough people understand how to leverage. But the more

15:45videos you start posting, the more important it is to dive into the data and figure out what's actually working well for your channel. Now, if you quickly want to see how your community is responding to your videos, you can click this community tab right here. And this will open up really quickly all of the comments on your entire catalog. So we can see there's videos that were recently just posted, like this one was posted today. And there's videos that have been posted for months that are active here getting engaged with. I could respond to this person, heart a message really quickly, and respond to my community right here in this tab. If

16:15you want to customize your channel a little bit, you can scroll down here to the customization button. Click that. And here's where you can change your banner image or your profile picture or even your handle. So this is if somebody like ats you or mentions you in a comment, they would say @think media TV. They wouldn't just say Think Media. It's kind of like your at@ symbol on Instagram or X. So you could change that right here. This is also where you

16:37change the description of your channel. So you could change that if you would prefer and add some different links that people can click on in your channel description. And if you've noticed throughout this video, there's this little icon right here that maybe you don't see if you don't have the plugin installed, but this is called Vid IQ. This is a program and a software plugin that you can add to your YouTube studio to give you some interesting analytics about your channel. So, if you just like were to click this video, the outliers, Vid IQ is actually going to open up its back-end software that we have an

17:08account with, and it's going to try to find outliers that are similar to the types of content we create. So, here's where I could start doing research on videos that are doing really well on the platform. Like this video right here, 10 camera angles and shots for cooking videos. This video is a 26x outlier for this person on their channel, which means this video is performing 26 times better than the channel's average performance. It has 480,000 views in the last couple years. So, these kinds of outliers could indicate that there's demand for these types of videos to be produced. And I could do a lot of good

17:41research here to try to apply these findings to my own videos. So, if you don't have this little icon, it's because we have a plugin called Vid IQ installed. We're actually a partner with Vid IQ. If you do want to try it out, I'll link it down in the description below and you can start for as cheaply as $1. Now, if you want to make sure you actually have your channel set up the right way, you can click or tap the screen right here to watch my video of how to set up your YouTube channel in the best way. And I'll see you over

18:04there.