Viewer count is the loudest metric and often the least actionable. Engagement is whether people talk, gift, follow, and stay after a topic change.
Messages per minute versus your baseline tells you if the room is awake. A high viewer count with dead chat is a lurking crowd, not a conversation.
Count unique gifters, not only diamond totals. One whale and a silent room is a different show from fifty small gifts.
Follows clustered after a specific ask are evidence. Follows smeared across the whole session are harder to learn from. Align the ask with a timestamp in the archive.
If you can sample unique viewers over time, look at how many remain 10 minutes after a spike. Raids that bounce teach you not to change the content to chase them.
Report two engagement metrics besides viewers. More than that and clients hear noise. Operators cannot optimize seven numbers at once.