This week I discovered a wonderful thing….YouTube Insights! I have a channel on YouTube and have uploaded 10 -15 videos for my company, trying to reach our target customers. These are everything from How to guides, getting started videos, demos, presentations, etc. Although I can tell how many people view the video, I always wondered who exactly was watching them, and were they attracting audience we wanted. Now thanks to YouTube Insights I can find out just that!
YouTube Insights is a free video metrics and analytics service. In March YouTube introduced YouTube Insights, which it aims to extend further in the future. It gives you the demographic breakdown of the viewers of your videos a chance to see who, where, how, when your video was viewed.
The details are collected from YouTube users whenever they watch a video, there sex, age, location and the list goes on. Video-by-video basis the demographics of viewers are broken down.
A bar chart represents the percentage of your audience in different age groups, and a pie chart showing the breakdown of gender. You can then filter that data by country or for a specific time frame.
To access this features, go to the “My Videos” section and simply click on the “Insight” link for any video where you’d like to see the stats.
Insights also shows referrals so you can see what links and methods are effective in driving traffic to your videos or channel on YouTube. As it links to Google they also provide which keywords users found your videos by when searching on Google as well as while searching on YouTube.
Although this data is extremely interesting, its key to remember and not get carried away, try to keep in mind that the data only shows information for viewers who are registered with YouTube. It would be interesting to see the number percentage of registered users compared to those who are not.
After looking at the data provided it from the videos I have created for my business, the data shown in YouTube Insights matches that of what our target customer is. Therefore the data is useful to me as it confirms that our videos are reaching our targeted consumer based
I am surprised that YouTube doesn’t charge for this service. In the future i think they will introduce an “upgraded version” of insights that YouTube users will have to upgrade to a higher level membership. Maybe they already offer a more detailed version to businesses that currently pay for adverts through YouTube.
