YouTube Analytics: Delving Deep Into Your Video Stats

YouTube Analytics is the statistics for all of your videos and can be found on your YouTube account and the first thing to remember that this version of Analytics works best when you have a lot of views coming to your videos as you can measure many different account metrics that you can analyze for making your own video channel one of the best around and highly optimized too.

Once you understand that your YouTube channel has a purpose and not just some random dumping ground for your favorite music videos then your Analytics become more useful as you go along with the range of different things you can view within your statistics. Studying your stats is an important component of an online business whether it's a website, blog or indeed a YouTube channel, you need to integrate any other stats like Google Analytics or at the very least study them all carefully to see whats going on.

YouTube Analytics can tell you what your top 10 videos are and what traffic they are getting and also what they are earning if you are a YouTube Partner. Also you can see how many likes and dislikes your videos get and how often your videos get favorited or shared.

Now lets take a closer look at the Analytics report tabs one by one and I'll highlight which ones are the most useful to you to help you create new targeted video content.

Estimated Earnings - This one isn't too important although it is an indicator of your most trafficked video content and it should correlate with your top videos. Of course if you want to rely on earnings from YouTube videos then this will be of importance to you and it can guage how well you are doing.

Views - This is how many views you get in any time period. By default it's set to 1 months worth of views but you can change that to daily, weekly, monthly or if your channel is a few years old then by year and you can compare the view data between each year. Other metrics that you can look at are what traffic comes from where in the world by either using the Geography search tab or by clicking the Map tab next to Line chart.

Always look at your top 10 videos as you can usually tell what content works and gets the traffic so you can then work on creating some more of that content.

Demographics - The Demographics is your little information window into what age, what gender and what country your video viewers come from and just like a regular business with the market research this is valuable information as it tells you who is actually reaching your videos and watching them not by name of course but by the top 10 Countries.

Playback Locations - This is where your videos have been played and it gives an indication of where either on a YouTube watch page of your Subscribers, Mobile devices, Emebedded Players and YouTube channel pages to name a few possible areas. Once you know the top 3 or 4 places people are watching your videos you can aim to increase video content for that area and promote accordingly. Ideally your channel page is one that should a high priority with any of the rest to follow.

Traffic Sources - This is like an extended look at your playback locations with some more ideas of where youir traffic originates from. Other ways could be Suggested YouTube videos or actually within YouTube search which if you don't know is very important to be found in search on YouTube as they are the second best search engine in the world next to Google at number one.

External websites also comes up as a traffic source although it doesn't seem to go too specific on which websites.Also feeds, Subscriptions, Annotations and Advertsing if you pay for it all are included in traffic metrics.

Audience Retention - This is to look at each video and see if your audience is interested in your video content all the way through the length of your video and you'll see a graph indicating whether they lose interest or their attention span is captivated by your excellent content. This is useful to see how engaging your videos are and whether you can try and add Annotations to your videos to hold interest or to try and experiment for future videos so that you'll increase your attention rate.

Under the next report tab entitled Engagement Reports we have some more useful stats to extract further information from.

Subscribers - This one shows you how many Subscribers you have and are getting within a certain timeframe and also how many Subscribers you have lost. What's interesting about this feature is that it can tell you what videos were the initial referrer for subscribers and also what Country your Subscribers are from, useful stuff to know most definitely!

 Likes And Dislikes - likes are cool, but Dislikes are really negative, but you just have to get used to it on YouTube as there are lots of Trolls who genuinely hate everything and will try and bring you down, but don't let them! You can see all of your Likes and Dislikes here Daily, Weekly or Monthly.

Favorites - This simply shows how many Favorites you have and this is just an indication of how many favorites were added and those that were removed as with the Likes and Dislikes the only metirc you have is by what Country have favorited your videos but with no specific info on what videos. Which is frustrating.

Comments - Here you see the number of comments dailt, weekly or Monthly and also change the year too to compare how many comments you are getting now as opposed to back in the first year when you first started on YouTube. Comments can be a good indicator of whether people are engaged with your video content even if you recieve positive and negative comments on your videos, it all can be analyzed. Either search through videos for Comment stats or your whole account as a whole for total number of Comments.

Sharing - This last feature shows you where a lot of your videos get shared around the Internet such as Facebook, Twitter and Email just to name a few. Also your top 10 videos are revealed as the ones that have been shared.

So when you need to look at your YouTube Analytics make it count because doing so can really increase your viewing rate if you analyze them carefully.