YouTube has some extremely detailed analytics which are important factors in building more traffic. There are many different kinds of analytics, all of them important for different reasons. Optimizing some put your videos in potential viewers’ sidebars, while other analytics factors are for YouTube’s algorithm. Today we’re looking at traffic source. By studying your analytics, you can see where most of your traffic comes from. From there you can improve your connection to those sources, and get more traffic.

Traffic sources can help you understand how well different ad campaigns are performing. It can even help you figure out how valuable paid views are when comparing different vendors. The potential is limitless, so the faster you can learn how to understand and use traffic source for your benefit, the better.

How to view your Traffic Sources

To view traffic source in your YouTube Analytics, simply login to your account. In the top right corner of the screen, click your profile icon and go to Creator Studio. Then in the left sidebar, click on the Analytics menu, and then click Traffic Sources.

If you have a lot of traffic, this will bring up a ton of information. Fortunately, there are plenty of sorting options to help break everything down.

First of all, it’s usually best to look at videos one at a time. Then, you can break down the data by a specific date range, such as when you were running an ad campaign. That way you can see the video’s traffic during that specific period of time. Certain visitors leave extra information, like the search term that let a visitor to find the video – and you can that info here as well.

Putting the information to good use

By knowing where most of your traffic is coming from, you can put more effort into specific sources. For example, if 95% of your traffic is coming from searches, it could mean a couple of things. Either you’ve got amazing SEO, or your other sources are being underutilized. Regardless, at this point, you’d want to look into your marketing campaign and see what’s going on with your external links so you can optimize them.

With high search traffic like that, you can also look into the keywords being used to gain some insight. Are people finding your video through keywords that you’re actively trying to rank for? If not, you may want to dump your current strategy and try a new one with the keywords that appear to be working.

All this is true for the opposite, as well. For example, imagine you are getting 95% of your traffic through external linking. If Facebook, blogs, and other websites are making up 95% of your traffic – you need some serious help with SEO. You’re targeting the wrong keywords, or the keywords you chose have too much competition. Either way, 5% search traffic isn’t going to help you gain organic subscribers.

Obviously these examples are a bit extreme, but you might be surprised what you find. Regardless, this is all information of which you’d otherwise be completely unaware. That’s the beauty of analytics – you can numerically see where you’re strongest, and where you’re weak. Once you know where a problem stems from, it’s easy to start fixing it.

Checking the value of your paid views

If you’re buying views, traffic sources play a huge role. Certain vendors promise high-quality targeted U.S. views, which are more valuable than those coming from India. You can make sure they’re being completely honest by double checking the results. Head over to traffic sources and filter it down to the video you boosted and the timeframe the campaign ran. Always check a company’s promises (and do your research by looking through sites like ours).

While we’re on the subject, make sure you’re double checking the retention rate of paid views, too. Retention rate is the reflection of the average amount of time your video was watched. It shows YouTube whether your video is interesting is not – high retention means people watched most or all of your video, while low retention shows that people would quickly get bored and leave. Retention can be just as important as geographic location, if not more important. You want to make sure you’re not paying for 70% retention and only getting 30%.

Keep twisting and tweaking

As a creator on YouTube, you should always be doing whatever you can to grow your audience. Using analytics is just one way of helping you do this. Always be ready and willing to adapt to new changes on the platform. Try to think outside the box, and get creative with your marketing ideas. With the right amount of hard work and perseverance, anyone can make it big on YouTube, even you!