Today I’m continuing my “Navigating YouTube Analytics” series to talk about the second section of YouTube Analytics: The Engagement Report. If you missed my previous post, you can learn about the Views Report here.

The Engagement Report is broken down into five sections: subscribers, likes and dislikes, favorites, comments and sharing. Each part offers insight into how your viewers interact with your videos.

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Subscribers: This section shows the change in the number of subscribers to your channel. It also shows from where people are subscribing – whether it’s from your channel directly or from a specific video.

What You Can Learn: It’s important to gain relevant subscribers so that your videos can reach a better and larger audience. The crux of this section of the analytics is in understanding which videos produced the most subscribers. If a certain video gained more subscribers, you know that video is relevant to people and it’s something that motivates them to keep up with your channel.

Tip: To help boost these subscription numbers, consider adding a “subscribe” annotation button within your video that makes your viewer a subscriber when clicked upon; this facilitates more subscriptions effortlessly.

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Likes and Dislikes: This section shows the likes and dislikes your channel received as a whole as well as each individual video.

What You Can Learn: The more likes you get, the more you can tell whether or not your audience likes your content. The number of likes can impact your YouTube and Google rankings, so it’s not an element you should ignore.

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Favorites: The favorites section shows how many people added or removed your videos to or from their favorites list.

What You Can Learn: Similar to the Likes and Dislikes section, the net change in your Favorites can show which of your videos your viewers like enough to make a favorite.

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Comments: The comments report maps out how many comments your channel received and how many comments each individual video received.

What You Can Learn: Comments are another big component to YouTube and Google video rankings. They are also the best way to communicate with your audience about your content. It is important to keep up with your comments and respond to viewers who take the time to engage with your videos.

Tip: Try providing extra information or goodies (perhaps a link to some relevant video they won’t have seen) when responding to viewers to make sure they know that you appreciate their time and business.

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Sharing: This section outlines how many times viewers have shared each of your videos. It breaks the data down into the date each share took place as well as on what platform people shared the video (Twitter, Facebook, Linked In. etc.).

What You Can Learn: Shares may be the best way to measure your viewers’ engagement with your content. The only way a video goes viral, or just becomes successful, is if people share it. If your share numbers are low, that tells you that your video content isn’t inspiring viewers to share it.

Tip: To make something worth sharing, it either has to be entertaining, very informative or strike some kind of emotional key with the audience. If your videos don’t do one or more of those things, they will never get shared and never be successful.

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Audience engagement with your videos is the best way to know if you’re successfully using video marketing. Even though it may be hard to put a monetary value on YouTube videos, you can set social goals surrounding audience engagement to know you’re successful.

With YouTube’s new design layout came a new look for YouTube Analytics, previously known as “Insight.” These metrics break your performance down into three sections – Earnings Report, Views Report and Engagement Report. Today I’m going to focus on the Views Report and will cover the Engagement Report in a later Entry.

The Views Report is broken down into five sections: Views, Demographics, Playback Locations, Traffic Sources and Audience Retention. Each section provides a unique insight into your video’s performance.

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Views: This section shows the number of views, by date, your channel accumulated as a whole and the number of views, by date, for each individual video.
What You Can Learn: This is an easy way to gauge how well each video is performing on a basic level. Pay attention to when your videos see the most views. Do they get a lot of views when first uploaded, and then trickle off, or do they constantly receive a steady stream of views?

Tip: Also take note if there are certain days of the week your videos are viewed more often. This may indicate the best time to post new videos.

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Demographics: This section shows you the age and gender of your viewers as well as their locations down to country and state.

What You Can Learn: This is an important piece of the analytics if your product/service is catered to a specific age, gender or locale. These numbers can tell you if you are on the right track with your videos and that you’re reaching the right target audience.

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Playback Locations: This section, formally part of the Discovery Report in Insight, lays-out where/how online viewers are watching your videos – for example, on a YouTube watch page, mobile device, channel page or on another site with an embedded player.
What You Can Learn: The two important features of the playback locations are the number of views on mobile devices and the number of views on embedded players. If the number of views on mobile devices is low or non-existent, check to make sure your videos are playable on mobile devices. This setting can be found in the Edit Info and Settings on each video in the Video Manager section. If you, or someone else, has embedded your YouTube player on another site, this section can tell you how many views have been seen there compared to on YouTube itself.

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Traffic Sources: The traffic sources, previously known as Discovery in the old YouTube Analytics, tell you how people are discovering your videos – from YouTube, from outside YouTube on other portals or websites, or from Mobile Apps and direct traffic.

What You Can Learn: There are a couple key insights you can make from this section. The most important may be how many views are coming from YouTube or Google searches. If the percentage of these two sources are low, that means your videos are either not coming up when people search for your topics, or your audience isn’t searching for what your videos offer. If these numbers are low, you may want to try and better optimize your YouTube title, descriptions and tags. Another key insight is the Home Page feed and subscriptions sources. If these numbers are low, that may mean you either don’t have enough subscribers or you don’t have the right subscribers because they aren’t interested in your content. The last big source, if you participate in it, is the YouTube advertising. This will show you if your advertising spend is successful or not. Knowing where your traffic comes from helps you to know how to best market your videos.

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Audience Retention: This section, formally know as Hot Spots, is only for individual video data. It tells you how much of your video your viewers are watching and at what point in the video they stop watching.
What You Can Learn: By studying the audience retention, you can understand if your video is engaging enough to keep the attention of your audience or not. If people are dropping off early in the video, this could tell you that the beginning of the video isn’t engaging enough or if your video isn’t what people expect when they click on it. If people are dropping off somewhere in the middle of your video, you may want to consider that your video is either too long, or not entertaining or educational enough. This section is really important to monitor so that you can know if you should edit your videos or not.

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It’s important to periodically sign into YouTube and spend some time checking-out your analytics. Video marketing isn’t nearly as effective if you can’t tell if it’s successful. It’s also a marketing source that is hard to put a financial return upon, so consider setting a “social” return goal on your vides that measures things like views, interaction, shares etc.