Tweaks to YouTube Analytics

There’s always a constant trickle of changes – sometimes improvements, sometimes not – to YouTube and now there’s a handy update to the Analytics tool which lets you do a direct month-to-month comparison in your stats.

You’ve always been able to select a date range for the Analytics to work from but now when you hover the mouse over any of the categories (such as Performance, Estimated Minutes Watched and so on), a small pop-up appears in white text on a black background, giving you the comparable metrics for the previous period.

So if you selected “This month” as your overall Analytics results, you’ll get the comparable result for last month and a percentage change as well. The function only seems to work (for us at least) on the Overview page and not for all the sections. But it’s nice to have anyway.

The same kind of function, we notice, is also available in Google Analytics, by ticking “Compare to” and choosing which period.

But be cautioned – hours can be wasted idly analysing dates against dates without any actual useful purpose. It’s just fun.