YouTube users have been able to discover key stats on who’s watching their videos for a while now, using Insight. But now it’s replacing Insight with YouTube Analytics, which will be released to everyone over the course of today.
The new features will include a new overview section which provides the key information quickly, while also enabling easy access to more detailed information. Ted Hamilton, Product Manager, also announced the following enhancements in a blog post today:
- More Detailed Reports: Analytics now includes more detailed statistics so that you can have a more precise understanding of your content and audiences.
- Audience Builders: Discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions.
- Audience Retention: See how far viewers are watching through your video in the new audience retention report.
It’s worth noting that YouTube Analytics reports will be generated using the same data that people are used to with Insight, but the plan here is to present the data in a more useful and interactive way.
The Summary report shows some top-level performance metrics for YouTube videos, and clicking on the title of each widget will take users to that specific report:
All reports will be unified with a Data Filter, and this tool will be displayed at the top of each report. This lets you filter by Content, Geography, and Date.
Most reports will have a Line Chart by default, covering the distribution of a metric over a specified date range, but you can also add Date granularity and Compare metric, the latter of which could let you compare different viewer-types:
Furthermore, most reports will have an interactive Map, outlining the geographic distribution of the metric reported over a specified date range. You can hover over one of the countries this with your mouse to see the data for this particular country.
Google-owned YouTube first launched its insights service back in March 2008, giving users information such as video-views in specific geographic regions and its popularity relative to other videos in a market over a set period of time. And in September 2009, we reported on YouTube’s new Insights for Audience tool, which applied analytics to the whole YouTube audience rather than just to specific videos.
Meanwhile, here’s an Analytics infographic YouTube has pulled together:
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.