The Top Twitch Metrics For Measuring Influencer Marketing Campaigns

The gaming industry has seen massive growth in recent years, with ESPN recently airing NBA2K tournaments, esports’ consideration as an Olympics sport, and investments from celebrities like Lebron James driving mainstream adoption

At the center of the esports universe is Amazon-owned Twitch, the live streaming platform for gamers, where audiences have surged 47% in recent months. On Twitch, personalities like Ninja and Shroud - who just made a triumphant return to the platform - celebrate the culture of gaming with their followers. And brands are realizing the importance of developing a holistic marketing and advertising strategy carefully crafted for the gaming community, which will play an important role in the future of sports.

Brands like Gillette, UberEats, Monster Energy, and KFC have all tapped into the embracing arms of the Twitch community and scratched their marketing itch with a variety of activations around reviews, product placements, giveaways, events and unboxing videos.

In order to forge authentic, long-lasting relationships with gamers on Twitch, it’s essential to understand the community, which is something that can’t be learned overnight. That’s why brands are turning to Twitch influencers to drive these initiatives. But with all the emerging platforms, measuring the ROI can be difficult, especially when you don’t understand a platform’s unique key metrics.

Twitch’s Unique Metrics

Just as the esports industry experiences an influx of resources dedicated to it, marketers are developing a deeper understanding of best practices and the metrics that matter for measuring campaigns - especially as it pertains to top gaming platforms like Twitch, which serves as an important ecosystem for branded integrations in the vertical.

Twitch has a variety of standard metrics that should be monitored such as account followers and views. Additionally, there are some unique Twitch metrics to track for influencer campaigns:

- Average Concurrent Viewership: This is the average number of viewers that are in a streamer’s live broadcast at any given time, which gives a good sense of how many people streamers are actively reaching on a day to day basis.

- Average Viewers: The average number of concurrent viewers in a stream. To calculate this number, Twitch checks how many viewers there are at each point in time when a streamer is live. The stat in the top bar is an average of this number across all the time streamed in the selected date range.

- Follows: The number of follows a streamer’s channel receives in a selected date range.

- Unique Viewers: The number of unique people who viewed a live stream across a selected date range. (If a viewer watched three streams in this time period, they would count once in this calculation.)

- Peak Stream Views: The highest number of viewers watching a stream while it was live.

- Followers at the Time of the Stream: The number of channel followers at the time of the stream.

- Average Stream Views: The average number of views a stream receives.

Some of these metrics may be new to marketers not having experience with Twitch, so it’s important to understand them and how they connect to overarching goals. But with roughly a billion hours of creator content being streamed on Twitch every month, these metrics will be essential in the future of advertising for the platform.