Just about every metric on the internet can be measured. Youtube is no different. The best part, is that youtube has some tools to help built right in. And where it falls short, there are other resources found on other websites that will surely give you the metrics to analyze.

If you’re making videos to gain employment or work in general, you’ll want to drive people to your website. If people discover your video on youtube and found it helpful, have a call to action direct them to your website for further information. Your website is your domain. There you’re able to control everything from how your content is presented as well as show how prospects can hire you... If that’s part of your business model.

Understanding how to direct traffic to your website is a key part of diversifying your influence and broadening your audience base. The best place to start is by analyzing your success or failure through the tools youtube as well as a few other websites have to offer to gain insight to what is really happening.

Youtube offers a thing called analytics, they are tools that measure many different parts of engagement, attitudes and behavior of your viewers.

There are many tools within analytics, lets look at each of them and tell you how they work: here is how youtube describes them:

Estimated earning reports are reports that provide earnings-related details for the four partner content types as well as the channel and video levels. It also includes total estimated earnings, ad earnings and if applicable, earnings derived from transactions on youtube rentals.

The ad performance report provides data on gross revenue, estimated monetized playbacks, cpms or cost per thousand and ad impressions for the ads that run on your content. You would use this report to assess how different ad types are performing over time relative to one another.

The views report contains data about views and estimated minutes watched for the content, geography and date range specified in the data filter. Analytics views data is updated once a day, which means that the numbers displayed in these reports may differ from the public values displayed on the video page, channel page, video manager, or other sources. That aggregated data includes views and estimated minutes watched from youtube, embedded players, and mobile applications.

The views section shows the number of views for your top 200 videos. If your public video viewcount is frozen at 301+, dont be worried, this is the result of youtube’s view count validation process. After the validation, the view count will resume, counting all those views during the validation and past it.

You can also compare the number of views to the number of individual people that viewed this content through the unique cookies metric. This metric counts the number of browser cookies for a given video or channel. Note that, if a viewer clears their cookies, uses more than one device, or uses more than one browser to watch your video or channel, they will be counted more than once.

The demographics report will help you understand the age range and gender distribution of your audience and is based on logged-in users on all devices. You can adjust the date range and geographic region to see how the breakdown of your audience varies. You can view this data in both interactive graphs and charts with numerical data.

The playback locations report shows the page, site, or device that the video was viewed on.

Your traffic sources report shows the sites and youtube features that viewers use to find your content. You can use it to get insight into the many ways viewers find your videos — for example, see if viewers are searching directly on youtube, clicking "suggested videos" thumbnails, or following links from social networking websites like twitter or facebook.

The devices report gives you information on the different devices and operating systems that people use to watch your videos. You will be able to see the number of views and estimated minutes watch coming from computer, mobile, tv, game console and other devices both on a channel and video level. Each device type has detailed information on the different operating systems the viewers are using in those devices. You can select each operating system to find out more details of which devices are being used in each case.

The audience retention analytics show the estimated amount of time that a viewer has watched a video. This way you have a better sense of what content viewers actually watch, over those that they click on and then abandon.

The subscribers report shows how you’ve gained and lost subscribers across different content, locations and dates. Subscribers are viewers who tend to be more engaged with your content and watch your videos on a regular basis. This section helps you understand your effectiveness at building a base of subscribers. You will be able to spot videos which drove subscriptions and unsubscriptions, and identify locations where your content is particularly popular.

The likes and dislikes report summarizes how many people liked and disliked your videos. The report shows the net change of likes and dislikes in your videos. It subtracts dislikes from likes to give you a net gain of likes, if you have more dislikes than likes there will be a negative number.

The videos in the playlists report show how many times your videos were added or removed to viewers’ playlists. It can be as simple as having been added to a default playlist such as “watch later” or “favorites” as well as any other playlist a user or yourself have created. You can see the overall number of times your videos were included in a playlist over a selected date range and location, as well as break out videos added to playlists and videos removed from playlists.

The comments report summarizes how many people are commenting on your video. The table total engagement, which aims to help you understand which videos are attracting and engaging the audience the most. "Total engagement" includes the following data: likes, dislikes, favorites added and removed, shares, comments, subscribes and unsubscribes

The sharing report shows how many times your content has been shared through the share button on youtube, and what sites viewers are using to share your videos like facebook, tumblr, and others.

The annotations report provides information on the performance of video annotations and gives engagement information such as click-through rate and close rate for annotations on videos. It covers these 5 aspects:

Clickable impressions are the number of times an annotation with the option to click further was displayed.

Closeable impressions are the number of times an annotation with the option to close it was displayed.

Click-through rate is the percentage of clickable annotations that received clicks.

Close rate is the percentage of annotation impressions that were closed by the viewer. And

Clicks are the number of clicks an annotations receives.

Lastly, the cards report give you information on how viewers are interacting with the cards on your videos. Depending on the type of content you’re looking at, you can select to see cards data by channel, asset, video, card type, individual card, geography, and date. You are able to see card teaser impressions or the number of times card teasers are shown. Teasers can have multiple impressions per view. Card teaser clicks are the number of clicks on a card teaser. Card icon clicks get attributed to the last teaser shown.

Card teaser ctr the click-through-rate of card teasers, which is the ratio of teaser clicks to teaser impressions. Card impressions are the number of times a card was shown. A card impression is logged for each card on a video when the card panel is opened. Card clicks are the number of clicks on a specific card. Card ctr is the click-through-rate of cards, which is the ratio of cards clicks to card impressions. Start time is the time in the video where the teaser is shown for a few seconds. Call to action is the text prompting the viewer to visit the specified link. The teaser text is an optional feature for merchandise, fundraising and associated website cards. If not specified, this is the call-to-action text.

Video that contains the card. Clicking on the video title in the table will bring you to the video’s watch page.

Youtube analytics offer data on just about every aspect of your videos and channel. However, when they fall short, or don’t disclose the information in a way that is helpful, there are other sites that have a different presentation of the data, and in some cases a different aspect of  that same data, or different metrics to compare your data to even other channels. We’re going to cover two of these sites, social blade and vidstatsx.

Social blade is a youtube statistics tracking website that allows you to watch the progress of your youtube channel. Social blade offers the ability to track youtube progress and statistics. Check potential estimated earnings, find out what networks are bringing in the most views to your channel. Track your subscriber and viewer growth and find out when you could get potential subscribers. They offer a comparison of your channels stats with other channels.

Vidstatsx compares high level stats between your and another channel. They give ranks for individual videos.  What’s trending today and each video has a rank that points to engagement or likeability. They also offer a product called future rank, it projects how a channel will perform over the next 7 days to 90 days, breaking down a video by genre, favorites, comments, ratings, and views.

The takeaway from each metric within youtube’s analytics is different, depending on your goal.  Each of them can be used in multiple ways. Remember they are just a tool to measure a given metric. Your story might look drastically different over your youtube career. When you start, your goal might be to grow how many views your video gets. But soon, it might be to grow your subscriber base. Once you have a consistent audience, you might want to move on to audience retention. All of these tools will be helpful in the process of building your channel and give you helpful insights on what the habits are of your viewers and if analized show you where you need to go, or what things you need to change.

The traffic on your channel will tell a story of who is watching your content, where they are watching, if they liked it, how long they watched it, what they did after watching it, if they shared it with their friends, how the ads performed and how much you made from those ads. Taking that information, using it to explain the viewing habits of your audience and focusing your attention to improve those analytics will greatly increase your efforts.