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Track YouTube Traffic and Social Engagement With YouTube Analytics

Ileane

YouTube underwent a massive redesign of the entire website in late 2011 that promises to deliver more engagement, bigger audiences, improved analytics and even higher earnings for content creators like you and me. Previously we looked at some of the changes introduced to the layout of our YouTube channel pages and what our subscribers will see when they watch our videos. And in Ivin's guest post he discussed the YouTube Creator's Playbook and how it offers strategies for building an audience through maximizing the use of meta-data, calls to action, audience retention techniques, and video commenting (which Ivin likes to call vommenting). 🙂

In this post, we'll kick it up a notch and take a look at the changes YouTube implemented on the back-end of our channels. Let's explore the revamped video traffic tracking platform that was launched in December 2011, and which is not too surprisingly called YouTube Analytics.

YouTube Analytics Goes Deeper Than Insights

YouTube's updated Analytics replaces the older traffic tracking interface called YouTube Insights and here is your first look at each of the charts, graphs, and audience engagement metrics we have available for our channels in addition to every one of our uploaded videos.

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel and give the video a Thumbs up!

Take Advantage of Analytics

When you look at Google Analytics for your blog or website traffic, hopefully you've trained yourself to process the information and make tweaks to your blog based on key factors such as, referrers, bounce rates, hits, impressions, unique visits, and so on. You should begin to train yourself to do the same thing with the data you extract from YouTube Analytics.

Find out what's driving traffic to your videos. Is the video showing up in Google search? Or perhaps YouTube search is sending you traffic. If so, take a look at the keywords that you're ranking for and be sure to develop content on your blog for those keywords as well. You can use the YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool to find out what other or similar videos people are searching for. Remember the YouTube search engine works differently from Google Search, so learn to make the best out of both of them. The good thing is, if you're making videos, you already have an advantage over all those over content creators that don't!

Let's go over the meta-data one more time!

I'm going to go over this again until I think you guys get the message. I don't mean to sound like a nagging mother-hen but I see so many people making this mistake that I'm starting to feel like one, so here it goes:

You must include the http:// in front of the URL, so that the url will be hyper-linked. Listen guys – I didn't make this up, it's coming right from YouTube (see page 39 of the YouTube Playbook). In each video description, you need to add links to your channel, your Twitter account, your Facebook account, your Google+ and any other video you want to promote every time you upload a new video. Take the time to go back and update the descriptions of those old videos you uploaded too. People who are watching your videos for the first time, will see your calls-to-action and become your new fans and followers. I know it's counter-intuitive and almost feels spammy to add all of those links in the descriptions but this is one time you don't need to feel that way.

After I saw the list of recommended links the YouTube Playbook this morning I realize I need to go back and add my Google+ links to all of my video descriptions now too!

I've put together a list of some really great YouTube content providers and resources that you should check out. So no more excuses ok (I know we talked about eliminating the excuses for not making YouTube videos already but some of you might have missed it).

What do you think, have you checked out the new YouTube Analytics yet?

 

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