Have you logged into your YouTube account recently? Did you check out the improvements made to the YouTube Insight (i.e. analytics) tools? It’s really worth looking at. YouTube are constantly improving Insight and it has become a hugely powerful and easy-to-use tool to track who and where your listeners are.

To get started you need to login to your account and go to My Videos > Insight which will bring you to a summary view screen that gives an overview of video performance for all of your uploads:

From here you can drill down to each of your individual videos and get info on popularity by demographics, by region and also look at what brought viewers to your video. Here are our five favourite features of YouTube Insight:

#1 Custom date ranges

The interactive slider in Insight allows you to look at statistic for specific date ranges. This is really useful if you are promoting a video over a period and want to measure the results. The speed at which Insight recalculates all of the data for different time periods is astounding (for data nerds like us in Amp at least).

#2 Geographics

For any of the metrics you want to measure, YouTube Insight allows you to break it down by country and even by region within a country using the clickable world map. For example, the image below shows the age and gender breakdown for Texans viewing any video on an artist’s channel.

#3 Discovery

‘Discovery’ is a nice word for traffic sources, i.e. how people got to your video. It also tells you how many people saw your video as an embedded video in an external site such as your website and how many viewed it ‘within’ YouTube.

For  specific information as to what links drove traffic to individual videos you will need to refresh My Videos > Insight and select the video you want to examine. From the drop down menu in Discovery choose ‘Links followed to this video‘ and a series of results will be displayed and charted up. These too can be further explored so that you can pinpoint the specific link, search term or related video which generated the most traffic to your video. For example, in the image below we can see that for one particular video there were 83 views that came from a link in an external website called louiseannette.com.

#4 Hot Spots / Attention measure

Those smart people in YouTube have done some complex mathematics to calculate a measure for audience attention. They chart your upload against the score for an average video which should yield you ‘Hot Spots’; sections of the video where your audience is paying the most attention. Handily you can watch your video and track the changes at the same time.

#5 Community

A handy way to track videos interactions. This feature counts total ‘Engagements’ (which can be further broken down into Comments, Favourites and Ratings) and creates a standardised Engagement-per-100-views metric which allows you to make direct comparisons regardless of overall video popularity. For example we can see in the charts below that viewers from the United States account for the larger volume of interactions for this artist, however when we look at the Engagement-per-100-views measure it is the Japanese audience who interact with the content the most.

There are lots of really interesting things to learn from YouTube Insight and we highly recommend that you play around with it for a few hours. You are guaranteed to learn new things about your audience and this knowledge can act as a springboard for ideas on how to improve your YouTube views.

Remember folks, YouTube is the number one website people use to search for music and a recent Midem study conducted by Nielsen found that people are 3 times more likely to watch videos online than legally download them. So the message is, get your music up on YouTube. And once it’s there, use YouTube Insight to learn about your viewers so you can convert them into paying fans.