The New YouTube Analytics
YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool, but one of the things that has held back its effectiveness has been lackluster performance measuring tools. YouTube Insights, while it offered some useful data, had several gaping holes. In many cases, users simply found the data extraneous.
Fortunately, the newly-redesigned tool has been re-released under the YouTube Analytics moniker, and it offers a number of new and highly-useful features, including:
- More data. This has been a long time coming. YouTube Analytics gives a greater degree of detail, and it puts it at your fingertips. There are predefined reports that give you the information you need. You can filter that data by a number of factors, including content, geography, and date
Perhaps most interesting about these reports is the ability to display data in various formats. You can use daily, weekly, or monthly data. You can compare separate metrics on a single chart. You can move between a line chart and a map view. In the map view, hovering over a country gives you more detail. These reports are all fully downloadable, as well.
- An improved dashboard. The YouTube Insights dashboard left a lot to be desired. It was far from intuitive. The Analytics dashboard, in contrast, puts summary data right on the page, performance of your channel, how people find your videos, and more. Each of the dashboard reports are, of course, clickable, allowing you to get access to all of that valuable data mentioned above.
- Retention statistics. One of the most useful metrics as a marketer is to know how far through your videos views typically make it. Once your video has 300 views, it will begin to generate retention statistics.
There are two types of retention measured here: absolute and relative. Absolute retention gives you a look at each moment in your video in relation to the number of starting views. Relative retention refers to how long viewers watch your video when compared to other YouTube videos that have a similar length.
There are other new tools too – such as a look at earnings potential if you’re monetizing your videos. Most of all, this change shows that YouTube is committed to providing users with the kinds of important data they need in order to make the best use of their videos.
If you haven’t spent much time in the past with YouTube Insight, give Analytics a look and see just what kind of useful data you can find.
