An Overview of Recent Updates to YouTube Analytics

Posted by Leah Ludwig

Following a recent PR Lawyer blog post about Google and YouTube from our very own Jonathan Morein, I stumbled across this interesting article, “YouTube's analytics additions could reveal user engagement better.” I felt that it was only fair to share some of the YouTube analytics insights with our PR Lawyer readers – as we are all trying to educate ourselves on the best kept secrets of social media measurement.

First of all, do you even know that you can analyze the success of your YouTube videos? By simply logging in to your YouTube account and going to your account settings, you can access your YouTube analytics by finding “Analytics” in the horizontal toolbar of your screen. You can then choose the time frame for which you want to review analytics and can see Views and Engagement reports on your videos’ Demographics, Playback locations, Traffic sources, Audience retention and more.

The ZDNet.com article by Rachel King that I previously mentioned details that there have been several upgrades added to YouTube’s analytics capabilities. They include a “Time Watched” metric, which identifies the estimated number of minutes a video is watched over a given amount of time as well as the ability to compare metrics. Users can now compare trends and patterns across different metrics. Producers of YouTube content can identify the value of a video by comparing time spent watching with estimated earnings.

As part of YouTube’s Engagement reports, Annotations are among the most used features to drive audience engagement. Users are now able to utilize the beta version of Annotations reports to view data on the performance of their video annotations, with insights on viewer click and close rates.

When engaging in the Views reports that YouTube provides, the user has the option to utilize a date slider. This new feature is available so that the user can easily adjust the date range of the data that they are reviewing and can see how videos perform across different time periods from seven- and 30-day totals to weekly and monthly totals. These rolling totals help to smooth the trends so that the user can see overall growth without some of the distracting spikes and dips. To view a full list of YouTube analytics improvements, visit the official YouTube Creators blog.

YouTube analytics and its recent upgrades can certainly provide helpful resources to you or your company in relation to your next video content marketing campaign. Feel free to check them out and put these tools to good use when measuring the success of your next production or campaign.