As a creator, you may have told your subscribers to “ding the notification bell” as part of your video’s call-to-action. Clicking on the bell icon turns on post notifications for your channel, but there’s so much more to it than that.

Here’s everything you need to know about post notifications.

Subscribers have to turn on post notifications manually.

As a default, YouTube only sends its user’s occasional notifications. Users may receive an email or a push notification to their phones alerting them to a new upload from a channel they’re subscribed to. However, they won’t be alerted to every new upload automatically.

This is why your call to action is so important. If your subscribers don’t click on the notification bell, then they will not be notified every time you upload a new video. Encourage them to ding the bell or join the “notification squad” in order to drive more first-day views.

To further encourage your subscribers to ding the notification bell, you might take an extra minute out of a future upload to teach them how. Use screenshots to help them visualize how the notification bell works. They can choose between receiving all notifications and personalized notifications.

You can check your stats on how many post notifications went out.

Post notifications are part of your channel analytics in YouTube Studio. You can see both how many subscribers have post notifications turned on and how many of them received notifications for your latest video.

In the “Channel analytics” section of your YouTube Studio, click on “Audience.” On the right, find the card labeled “Subscriber bell notifications.” There, you can compare the number of your subscribers who have post notifications turned on to the number who have all notifications turned on.

To see how many post notifications went out for a specific video, head to that video’s analytics page. Then, select the “Reach” tab. In the right column, find the card labeled “Bell notifications sent.” You can see how many notifications went out, how many subscribers clicked on it, and how many views they garnered.

You may not see the cards immediately after uploading.

After you upload a new video, the “Bell notifications sent” card may not show up immediately. It can actually take up to forty-eight hours, or two days after the initial upload, to appear. If you still don’t see the card after forty-eight hours, you may not have enough reachable subscribers.

The same principle applies to the “Subscriber bell notifications” card. If you don’t see it in your “Audience” tab, then you may not have enough reachable subscribers yet. Continue growing your channel so that you can start utilizing post notifications.

Post notifications alert subscribers to new uploads, but only if they’ve enabled them manually. Your channel analytics can tell you how effective your bell notifications have been for every video.