YouTube Engagement Rate Calculator

Use this useful YouTube Engagement Rate Calculator to work out the engagement rate for your videos, or your whole YouTube Channel.

You can also derive the total impressions and engagements you would need to get a specific Engagement Rate on any video. Feel free to experiment with different scenarios to help you better understand this metric.

 

 
 
YouTube Engagement Rate Formula
While there is no official engagement rate metric used by YouTube, it is widely accepted that YouTube measures it one of two ways:
  1. Standard Engagement Rate: All engagements (likes, subscribes, shares, comments, and clicks) as a percentage of video views (or sometimes video page impressions). This measure is very similar to what other social networks use, and is useful to see how interesting your videos are.
  2. Influencer Engagement rate: All engagements from the last 5-10 videos as a percentage of your subscribers. This measure is used in influencer marketing and is different from agency to agency. It is useful to see how much your fans are interested in you.
 
The YouTube engagement rate equation is:
 
YouTube Engagement Rate Equation - which is Total Engagements / Total Views
Click to enlarge
YouTube Engagement Rate = (Engagements ÷ Views) x 100
 
Note: While the above calculator is for the standard engagement rate, you can still use it to calculate influencer engagement rates by inputting subscribers in the views field.
 
How is engagement rate useful on YouTube?
Depending on what your goals are, a strong engagement rate on a YouTube video can mean:
  • A good template to replicate – look at the engaging video and see what you did right!
  • A good candidate to use as a video ad
  • An indicator of success in starting a conversation or spreading information
  • More subscribers
  • More organic (non-paid) distribution of your video on YouTube
  • An increase in the chance of your video being shared outside of YouTube
  • Increased earnings as an influencer
 
Should dislikes be included as part of my engagement rate?
Some people will include all engagements, including dislikes in engagement rate measures – but that is a mistake. Dislikes will not encourage YouTube to show your video to more people, so should not be included in this metric.
Similarly, negative comments would ideally be excluded as engagements – however as YouTube cannot easily distinguish between good and bad comments currently it is not something you need to do.
 
If a video has a lot of comments, you should check whether they are broadly positive or not before assuming that high engagement = success.
 
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