VideoYouTube Analytics Replaces YouTube Insight

YouTube Analytics Replaces YouTube Insight

YouTube Analytics will replace YouTube Insight. YouTube Analytics will offer a number of new features, including a new overview section, more detailed statistics, the ability to discover which videos drive the most views and subscriptions.

YouTube Analytics will replace YouTube Insight, Ted Hamilton, Product Manager, announced on the YouTube Blog. What does YouTube Analytics offer that Insight didn’t? According to Hamilton, YouTube Analytics includes a number of new features:

  • A new overview that displays key information quickly, while also enabling YouTubers to easily access more detailed information.
  • More detailed statistics so that YouTubers can get a more precise understanding of their content and audiences.
  • The ability to discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions.
  • The ability to see how far viewers are watching through their video in a new audience retention report.

YouTube has also updated its Creator Playbook, adding information about YouTube Analytics in pages 27 through 33.

Farewell, YouTube Insight

YouTube Insight was released in March 2008. A free tool, it enabled anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they’d uploaded to the site.

For example, YouTube Insight allowed uploaders to see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they were relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You could also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it took for a video to become popular, and what happened to video views as popularity peaked.

Since then, YouTube added several new features to Insight.

In April 2008, a Discovery tab was added that showed how viewers found a video, whether by searching on YouTube or Google, browsing under Related Videos, receiving a link to the video from an email or website, or watching it in an embedded player off YouTube.

In May 2008, a Demographics tab was added that displayed view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18–24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help YouTubers to get a better understanding of the makeup of their audience.

In September 2008, a Hot Spots tab was added that played a video alongside a graph that shows the ups and downs of viewership at different moments within the video.

In March 2009, a Community tab was added that allowed YouTubers to see how many times viewers had shared, rated, favorite, or commented on a video.

Each new feature gave YouTubers a better understanding of their viewers and how they engaged with their videos. Whether I wanted to know how old our audience was, how many times our most-viewed video had been rated the previous week, or which minute of a clip was most engaging, YouTube Insight could give me the answer.

A Quick Walkthrough of the New YouTube Analytics

youtube-analytics-overview

After signing up, I logged into the SESConferenceExpo’s channel on YouTube. A new Analytics (Insight) tab appeared at the top of the page and shows charts for performance, engagement, top 10 videos, demographics, and discovery.

youtube-analytics-engagement

Scrolling down I was able to quickly see that an older video, “Video Search Engine Optimization Panel Recap, Greg Markel,” which had been uploaded on Aug. 20, 2008, had received more views in November 2011 than a brand new video, “SES Chicago 2011 Keynote: Mikel Chertudi,” which was featured on the channel.

youtube-analytics-demographics

And I was also able to see that our top geographies were the United States, India, Canada, United Kingdom, and the Phillipines; 68 percentof viewers were male, 32 percent were female; 63.4 percent of views came from a YouTube watch page, 20.5 percent came from the embedded player on other websites, and 12.1 percent from mobile devices; and our top traffic sources were mobile apps and direct traffic (40.9 percent), views from YouTube (36.8 percent), and views from outside YouTube (22.2 percent).

YouTube’s Gift for Marketers

This indicates that there are a ton of new insights to be gleaned from drilling deeper into YouTube Analytics.

In short, YouTube Analytics is a significant improvement over YouTube Insight. And that’s a nice gift for marketers – just in time for Christmas.

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