YouTube Upgrades Free Analytics Tools To Provide Real-Time Results

YouTube announced a major upgrade to its analytics dashboard that will come as great news to many video publishers who want to gain additional insights into the reach of their uploads.

In the past, YouTube publishers weren’t able to determine accurate information about video views in the first hours after publishing, which caused a certain amount of uncertainty about how well videos were performing. Now, with the recent analytics dashboard upgrade, publishers will be able to access minute-by-minute information about how many people are watching their videos.

This is a long-awaited addition and will certainly be welcomed with open arms by many marketers and other YouTube publishers. The new analytics dashboard displays estimated real-time viewership data for a content owner or channel’s last five published videos in two charts, minute-by-minute for the last 60 minutes and hour-by-hour for a sliding window of the last 48 hours. In YouTube’s announcement, the company indicated that this data is also available when looking at reports for individual videos. While there is still some latency in the results, the new analytics dashboard provides close to real-time data.

“There is a latency of a few minutes between the occurrence of the view and its display in the report; data is then automatically updating, without the need to refresh the page,” reads YouTube’s support page on the new feature. “The ‘current’ hour bar is highlighted to stress that the hour is still incomplete. Realtime data is estimated and meant to provide general guidance on potential view activity on your videos. This approximate character of the numbers is also shown in the rounding off to two significant digits.”

When you consider the massive importance of YouTube in online video marketing, this announcement is big news throughout the advertising world. Even though publishers can’t analyze the sources of the video views, they can choose to launch campaigns from different social networks or websites at different times and subsequently determine which posts are providing them with the most effective results. The new real-time information will certainly increase the amount of information that marketers can use to refine the various ways that they advertise their brands on YouTube.

YouTube’s support page outlines the details of the data availability in its upgraded analytics dashboard.

“Realtime data is available on a per-video basis and cannot be aggregated. When selecting a different content entity, it is displayed as follows:

• Channel: When looking at channel level data, we’re showing the last 5 published videos. The vertical view count axis is aligned for all videos on one page to make comparisons easier.
• Content Owner: Similarly, we show the last 5 published videos of channels belonging to the content owner. In order to see realtime data, content owners must select the “All partner uploaded” option from the drop-down menu.
• Groups: If a video group contains 5 or less videos, realtime data for each video is shown. For video groups with more items and other types of groups (asset, playlist, channel) the report is not available.
• Assets, playlists, shows:Â For the moment, we don’t show realtime data for these entities.”

While YouTube’s new real-time analytics may not have everything that a marketer wants, the functionality certainly provides a new level of information that will greatly assist with making ad campaigns more effective, and the expectation is that YouTube will continue to enhance this tool over time.