There are many ways to get more views on YouTube, but researching your audience is the most underrated. After all, you can only chase viral trends for so long. Eventually, viewers will need a deeper reason to stay on your channel, like getting a problem solved or enjoying your personality.
We’ll show you how to build that foundation in six powerful steps. This article will teach you how to research your viewers, create a persona to understand them better, and use that information to sharpen your YouTube strategy. Best of all, we’ll do it using free data that exists in the YouTube Studio.
YouTube’s Audience tab is the best place to learn more about your viewers, subscribers, and non-subscribers alike. It has almost everything you need to know, from viewer demographics to the type of videos your audience is watching.
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Here’s how to find the YouTube Audience tab:
1. Go to the YouTube Studio and click Analytics in the left navigation bar.
2. Select the Audience tab.
This is where YouTube summarizes who is watching your channel and how they behave. The YouTube Audience tab is the fastest way to understand your YouTube viewer without external tools or surveys.
From here, you will build a persona based on facts, not vibes.
A YouTube viewer persona is a research backed profile of your ideal or most valuable YouTube viewer.
Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, a persona helps you focus on:
A strong YouTube viewer persona influences:
Start with the basics in the YouTube Audience tab:
This will help you build the foundation of your audience persona. Knowing their age, gender, where they live, and more brings context to their YouTube behavior.
Which videos do your viewers watch when they’re not on your channel? This question is important because they interact with other creators’ content too, not just yours. To truly understand why they’re on YouTube, you need a broad understanding of what they do on the platform.
You’ll find this data on two panels within the Audience tab:
Here, you’ll learn which topics your viewers follow on YouTube and who your competitors are. It also answers a gigantic question: Why do my viewers visit YouTube?
A healthy channel usually has both.
According to YouTube, the breakdown of new versus returning viewers on your channel indicates your audience's loyalty.
“This indicates that viewers may watch some of your videos but are less likely to return to watch more. It’s common to see this trend among channels that upload videos about different topics, which attract different types of viewers, or 'how-to' channels, where viewers watch a video to learn how to do something but aren’t likely to return to watch more.”
“This indicates that a channel has a loyal audience who is likely to return to watch more. It’s common to see this trend among channels that upload consistent content about similar topics or in a familiar format, channels with consistent hosts such as familiar faces and personalities that viewers grow to love, or channels that create popular series to keep viewers coming back for more.”
Depending on what you find, it may be wiser to target new viewers (if your channel is stagnant) or aim for loyalty (if you’re new to YouTube).
Now that you’re familiar with new versus returning viewers, let’s take it a step further. Which videos inspire people to return to your channel?
To find out, navigate to the Videos growing your audience panel.
Study this panel closely, and you’ll learn which videos turn new viewers into repeat viewers!
This section shows which videos:
You won’t see this on the Audience tab, though, so here’s how to navigate there:
1. Go to the YouTube Studio and click Analytics in the left navigation menu.
2. Click See More below the YouTube dashboard showing monthly views, subscribers, revenue, and watch time.
3. Select Subscribers Gained in the first filter box.
4. See which videos attract the most subscribers. Write those ideas down because you’ll need them later!
Lastly, check the Audience tab to see which videos get the highest watch time on your channel. Watch time is the total amount of time people spend watching your content, both on your channel and individual videos.
Like the previous metric, you won’t find this information on the Audience tab. So here’s how to get it:
1. Go to the YouTube Studio and click Analytics in the left navigation menu.
2. Click the Watch Time tab on the analytics graph, then click See More.
3. Next, you'll see a list of videos and the watch time they accumulated, starting with the highest amount. You can filter data by the last week, month, 90 days, year, or since the beginning of your channel. Be sure to write these videos down (perhaps the top 10).
By this point, you should know a few things about your audience:
Now it’s time to build a persona using all the information you found.
After completing the exercise above, here’s a basic persona we could build for the vidIQ channel:
Matt is a 24-year-old male who lives in the United States. He likes to watch channels like Film Booth, VEED Creators, Creator Booth, and Channel Makers, which means his main goal is to grow a YouTube channel. He’s interested in several topics, like how to start a faceless YouTube channel, get more YouTube Shorts views, and grow his subscribers. That’s the type of content he watches, and he typically does that on Sundays between 7 a.m. and noon.
Matt is a loyal viewer of the channel. He often returns to watch videos about monetizing a YouTube channel, achieving 4,000 watch hours, avoiding the biggest YouTuber mistakes, and growing as a small creator. To make Matt subscribe, I usually have to post videos targeted to small creators.
Once your YouTube viewer persona is clear:
When you’re ready, here’s how to test a video idea before you start filming.
The YouTube Audience tab is part of YouTube Analytics in Studio that shows who is watching your channel and how they behave.
Open YouTube Studio, click Analytics, then select Audience.
A YouTube viewer persona is a profile of your ideal viewer built using Audience tab data like demographics, behavior, and loyalty patterns.
New viewers are first time viewers in the period, casual viewers watch occasionally, and regular viewers return consistently over time.
Some data is limited due to privacy thresholds or reporting availability. Use available behavior signals instead of waiting for perfect data.
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Lydia Sweatt is a writer who loves balancing her article/blog time indoors with a healthy dose of nature. She bikes, hikes, and identifies edible plants along the way.
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