How To View and Analyze YouTube Statistics for Any Video

If you are an avid YouTube user, then you are likely already familiar with YouTube's video analytics functionality, YouTube Insight. YouTube Insight will provide you with information on how many people have viewed your video(s), what part of the world they are in, where views originated from and more...  But - did you know that you can also look at the statistics for almost any YouTube video, including those of your competition?

How To Check a YouTube Video's Stats

NOTE: The user who uploaded the video has the option to disable the display of statistics.  As a result, this may not be available for all videos.

1. First, go to the YouTube video page that you want to analyze. Make sure that you are on the individual video landing page and not the YouTube user's channel page.
2. On the lower right hand side of the video you will see a box, with the total number of views displayed along with a double down arrow next to it. Click this arrow and the video's statistics will expand.
3. The statistics will be separated into total views, total interactions, links to the video, audiences and honors.

Interpreting YouTube Video Statistics

Total Views

This shows you the total number of views that a video has accumulated over it's life span. Interesting to see the growth over time and key events that may be driving traffic to the video.

Comments, Favorites, Ratings

These numbers will show you engagement statistics for the YouTube video. The higher the number of these interactions, the more engaging the video is for viewers.  As you already know, engagement metrics can directly impact the success of a video on YouTube.

Referrals and Inbound Links To YouTube Video

This is the most interesting section in my opinion. Here you can see where the video views originated. You can see where the video was embedded off of YouTube, sites that link to the video, keywords that users searched for to discover the video, if the video was referred by a related YouTube video, and more. This is the most useful tool for determining what has been driving views for the YouTube video in question.

Audiences

Here you will be shown demographics of the audience - the gender, age and geographic location of the video viewers. Often times you will find information that may come as a surprise to you.  As a marketer, this information may help you identify a target market that you were not considering, all by looking at the audience of your competition.

YouTube Honors

This section will show what, if any YouTube honors the video has received. This includes things like most viewed, most discussed, and top rated in a given time period/category/country. Getting on these lists greatly increases a videos visibility and viral video potential.

Acting on the Competition's Video Data

There are a number of ways that you can take the information from another video's YouTube statistics and use it to your advantage. If you are just beginning to make the dive into internet video marketing and YouTube marketing in particular, a good first step for you will be to analyze the successful videos of your competition (if there are any). Look for and analyze videos with high views, comments, favorites and ratings and then learn what may be driving this engagement and why.

Analyze the sites that have embedded the video, are there any blogs or websites in your industry which generated a lot of traffic that you could reach out to? Having your video content embedded and linked to on sites outside of YouTube in addition to your own website can be a tremendously effective tactic for generating views, comments and overall higher video search engine rankings. This section will also show you the terms by which people searched for in order to discover these videos on YouTube, which can provide you with additional keyword research and insight for  optimizing your own videos for search.

What are the users saying in the comments (both good and bad)? Listening to the audience is the often times the best way to create content that your target demographic will enjoy and share. If your competition has already entered the Internet video space, you can use their feedback to your advantage. YouTube is known for having some ridiculous comment threads, but trust me, there's gold in that trash heap.

What is the demographic of the audience? Perhaps the audience for the video is not what you had assumed it was. You can tailor your content towards the actual audience rather than trying to determine who the audience will be prior to creating your videos. Additionally if you see that your content is geographically focused, you can edit your video to more effectively target those areas. The more your video content speaks to your target audience, the better your results will be.

Do you have any other tips or tricks for analyzing YouTube Statistics? Let us know in the comments!