WeChat Channels Analytics—A Tour
First released in 2020, WeChat Channels is the platform’s TikTok-style area where content creators can post short-form (less than fifteen seconds) or long-form (up to two hours) videos.
Fast forward to December 2023, WeChat Channels has approximately 490 million daily active users watching at least one fifteen-second video posted by one of the millions of the platform’s content creators.
If you’re an influencer, advertiser, marketer, or hobbyist/amateur content creator active on WeChat Channels and want to know how your videos are performing—this is for you.
In this post, we’ll be getting under the hood of WeChat Channels and the platform’s backend to understand the analytics data, what all the metrics mean, and how they relate to how your content is doing.
If you prefer your information in a video format or just enjoy listening to my explanations, you can also find this tutorial on YouTube.
Getting Started
In this demonstration, I’ll be using a desktop browser, so start by copying (or typing in) the following web address into the search bar: https://channels.weixin.qq.com.
Channels account setup is done through your personal WeChat account.
Once your accounts are linked, you can use WeChat’s scan function on your phone to scan the QR code on the screen.
After that’s all confirmed, I’m into the homepage area.
The Homepage
The top of the page contains some basic information:
- My name
- Profile picture
- ID Number
- Number of Videos
- Number of Followers
Underneath is a brief overview of everything that’s happened in the last 24 hours (highlighted by the red box).
According to this data, my account has the following:
- The net increase of followers – 6
- How many times my videos were played – 9278
- How many hearts (or likes) – 21
- The number of comments – 19
In terms of the number of followers, other channels will tell me how many “new” ones I have, whereas WeChat’s backend analytics takes into account that I might be up or down depending on how many followers I lose.
Below is a list of recent videos and their metrics.
Short-video content creators on other platforms may experience similar patterns for their content but, in my own experience, I’ve noticed a baseline number (around 2,000 views) for each video.
However, some videos take off and are viewed by many more people.
The Chinese character 万 (wàn) means ten thousand, so the third video in the list has 3.1万 or 31,000 views.
There’s a list of options on the menu bar on the left-hand side of the home page.
This post won’t go into detail about all of these different areas but will focus on the following four:
- Content Management
- Interaction/Comment Management
- Private/Direct Messages
- Analytics
Content Management
The content management area gives me access to the following options:
- Video
- Music
- Audio
- Events
- Homepage
On the video page, we see all the accounts’ video content organized by the date it was posted.
The metrics for each video can be viewed here so creators can check how their content is performing; however, better data is available in the video area (we’ll get on to that shortly).
There’s also an orange button to “publish” new ones.
The publishing page is where a creator can upload their video file and add additional information to their video, such as a description and location, links (places within WeChat), stores, and a specific time to be published.
WeChat will also ask you to confirm that the content you are about to publish is original.
IMPORTANT: You can only link internally within WeChat, such as to articles and member’s areas.
Comment Management
Managing your video comments from your desktop device is something you might find yourself doing quite a bit.
Your personal WeChat account will be linked to your Channels account.
You can see video comments from your personal account; however, you’ll be responding to the comments from there, which is not something you want to do because it will seem like the comments are from a completely different user (even if the names are the same).
Activity like this can look a bit suspicious, and viewers may suspect it’s a fake account.
To avoid this, respond to comments from your comments management area.
IMPORTANT: If multiple personal accounts are linked to your Channels, these other users can log in (as we’ve just done) and respond to comments and messages under the content creator’s name.
To get to the area, you need to return to your video page.
Hanging your cursor over one of your videos will bring up five options on the right-hand side.
Clicking on the little speech bubble symbol will take you to the video’s comment management.
In general, the most popular comments should feature first in the feed.
Hopefully, your content views are through the roof, and there are too many positive comments to process.
If you do want to engage with your audience and respond directly, you can either “like” by clicking on the heart symbol or select the “speech bubble” icon and write a message in the text box that appears.
You can also delete the comments if you wish to.
This might be the sort of audience-creator interaction you’re used to seeing on other platforms.
However, have you come across bullet comments before?
Bullet comments fly across the screen (like moving subtitles) as the video is playing.
The second area of comments management deals with bullet comments on your videos.
Direct Messaging
Channels also allows the audience to directly message the content creator.
You can view your direct messages, which are stored for about a month, here.
Viewers don’t tend to contact content creators as much as they might on other platforms, which is surprising considering one of WeChat’s primary functions is messaging.
IMPORTANT: If you’re using WeChat Channels for sales, you don’t want to interact with customers or potential clients here or on your WeChat Official Account for too long.
Instead, you’ll want to move these conversations to a personal account to continue things there.
Analytics
Now, this is where it can get a bit technical.
Therefore, for this section, the desktop’s browser language has been changed to English to make it easier to understand.
However, some of the translations might be a little off.
Under the data center option, you’ll see the options for
- follower data,
- video data,
- live data, and
- e-commerce data.
I won’t be discussing the live or e-commerce features because I don’t use either on my Channels account.
However, the follower and video data are very relevant.
Follower Data
In this follower section, adjusting the date range will give you the data for a different period.
There’s little or no follower growth during certain times then, all of a sudden, these plateaus of inactivity suddenly explode into spikes as the videos take off and, hopefully, go viral.
And that’s the great thing about short videos: At any moment, their popularity can go stratospheric.
(BTW: “Brought Data” is just the browser translation of the e-commerce data section, “带货”.)
Below, we have the growth details.
The image below presents a typical growth trend and provides the data for the day, total followers, and the net increase.
Interestingly, information about user demographics is also available:
- Gender
- Age distribution
- Access equipment (what they’re using to view the videos)
According to the data from the image above, we can draw a rough picture of a typical user.
I have slightly more male (53%) than female followers, and there’s an even split between iOS and Android operating systems for accessing the videos.
There’s a smaller, orange-colored segment representing “other” pieces of equipment: For example, desktop PCs and hard-to-identify Android devices.
According to the data, these followers are slightly older than the viewers you might see on other social media platforms.
WeChat is the platform everyone in China uses regardless of age, so the above data doesn’t mean the content appeals mainly to an older audience, and you need to get with the times.
If you can read Chinese and you’re already engaging with your followers or reading their comments, you may have noticed the language they use is very different depending on the platform you’re on.
If you want to get up to speed with the new slang, you’ll definitely encounter that on platforms with a younger user base (e.g., Douyin, and Xiaohongshu).
Around 36% of my followers are between 40–49 years old, and a large proportion are 50+.
From a marketing or business perspective, that’s an important demographic because this age group (normally) has more money.
Most of Nanjing Marketing Group’s clients in the B2B or services sectors want to reach this audience.
And WeChat is the perfect tool for that; even if you’re not specifically tailoring your content for an older audience, you’ll be reaching them anyway.
Video Data
In the video data area, you can see data trends for all (or just a single) videos.
The source distribution (as it is known here) chart shows how your followers find your content.
According to the source distribution chart, the majority of them come from recommendations, which is typical of short video platforms as the algorithm suggests more similar content.
Other metrics in the chart:
- Subscription Notifications – Subscribers to your channel receive a notification encouraging them to view more content.
- Friends Liking and Sharing – Friends will click the heart icon or share your video on their WeChat Moments.
- Channels Homepage – People encounter the videos on your Channels homepage.
- WeChat on PC – (Not many people use WeChat on their desktop computers.)
- 看一看 (kan yi kan) Section – The “have a look” feature in WeChat is another way of discovering content.
Now, let’s check the data for a single video.
Clicking the “play” button twice will bring up the most-played video within the time frame selected.
The last option “查看” (which roughly translates to “inspection”) shows me the specific data for the video.
Unfortunately, the data is not as granular as the data you’d get on TikTok or YouTube.
On TikTok, for example, you have access to second-by-second data, which allows you to pinpoint the moment—or even the word you said—that caused the viewer to move on or lose interest.
On other accounts, here’s the granularity of the retention data:
- One Second – YouTube, TikTok, Douyin, Xiaohongshu
- Three Seconds – Bilibili
- Five Points in Video – WeChat Channels
Short videos on any platform will usually follow a similar “quick drop” pattern seen in the image above.
Viewers will swipe away if the video doesn’t catch their eyes in the first second or so.
Time to analyze all of the data.
- Rate of Completion (Viewers Finish the Video) – 26.01%
- Average Watch Time (Seconds) – 46.23
- Views – 60,000
It’s worth mentioning that the percentage of viewers who finished the video is quite high.
Interaction metrics:
- Hearts (Public Like) – 137
- Thumbs Up (Private Like) – 206
- Comments – 138
- Followed (After Watching the Video) – 107
- Shared – 167
The next metric on that row is if the user did something “special” with the video, such as using it as a cover for their WeChat Moments feed (which nobody did).
In the next area, we can see the data trends.
If you change the input to a two-month timeframe, you get to see the lifecycle of a typical short video.
Explosive growth followed by a sharp decrease.
If we zoom in a bit closer we can see that the take-off happened over a single day, and then it was all downhill after that.
While this is the expected pattern for most short videos, not all follow the same “up-down” trajectory.
Content optimized for search traffic will see an increase in activity later on.
For example, a video containing helpful information or tips might see a gradual increase in traffic as people search for that keyword or phrase.
Here’s an example.
Despite being posted a while ago, the video in the image above is still getting traffic in the last thirty days.
Contact Us
I hope this has helped you understand the basics of the analytics data and the backend options on WeChat Channels.
You might not get the same granularity that you would on other platforms, but understanding how to access the relevant data will help you know which of your videos is trending (and when), who’s saying what about your content, and if your followers are using an Android or iOS device.
For more information on Chinese marketing in general, there’s our China Digital Marketing 101 page.