How to Find out Who Is Watching Your YouTube Videos

YouTube provides video creators with a wealth of information in its Analytics section. You can't find out specific names of people who saw your videos, but you can get a lot of helpful demographic information beyond only the view counts. The built-in analytics provide aggregate information about your viewers in a manner that is similar to Google Analytics. Use the up-to-date metrics to monitor the performance of your channel and videos.

To find the analytics for all the videos in your channel:

1. Log in to YouTube and click your profile photo or icon at the top of the screen
2. Click Creator Studio in the drop-down menu that appears.
3. Click on Analytics in the left panel to expand a list of tabs for different types of statistics related to your video viewers.

Information about your viewers can be viewed through several analytic filters that include:

• Watch time
• Audience retention
• Demographics
• Location
• Date or time frame
• Content
• Devices
• Traffic sources
• Likes and Dislikes
• Comments
• Sharing

Depending on the type of data you are reviewing, you can generate line charts to see how your video data has changed over time or multiline charts that allow you to compare the performance of up to 25 videos. 

You can download the reports to your desktop by clicking Export report at the top of the screen. The report includes all the information that is available for that report.

The first report listed under Analytics in the left panel is the Overview. It is a high-level summary of how your content is doing. The report includes performance metrics that summarize watch time, views, and earnings (if applicable). It includes the most relevant data for interactions such as comments, shares, favorites, likes, and dislikes. 

The Overview Report also highlights the top 10 pieces of content—by watch time— for your channel, the gender and location of viewers, and top traffic sources. 

Click on Realtime to see live stats that are updated in real-time with only a few minutes of lag time. the two charts show the estimated views of your videos in the previous 48 hours and during the previous 60 minutes, the device type that accessed your video, the operating system of that device, and where the device is located.

The charts on the Watch Time report includes the amount of time that a viewer watched a video. Are they just clicking on a link and then leaving because they realize they made a mistake or are they watching the whole thing? Use what you learn about your audience's viewing habits to make more videos people watch for longer. The data is updated once a day and has a delay of up to 72 hours. Use the tabs under the graph to view data by content type, geography, date, subscription status, and closed captions.

The Audience Retention report gives you an overall idea of how well your videos hang on to their audiences. The report gives the average view length for all the videos on your channel and lists the top performers by watch time. You can compare the watch times for a single video in different time frames. The report includes information on absolute audience retention data, which reveals which parts of your video are the most popular, and on relative audience retention data, which compares your video to similar YouTube videos.

You can also see the retention data of viewers that came to your video by organic traffic, paid skippable video ads, and paid display ads. 

As you might expect, the Traffic Sources report tells you the sites and YouTube features that brought viewers to your content. To get the most from your report, set a date range and view sources by location. Then you can filter the sources and viewers for additional information. This report differentiates between traffic that comes from sources within YouTube and traffic from external sources. 

Internal YouTube traffic sources include YouTube search, suggested videos, playlists, YouTube advertising, and other features. External traffic data comes from mobile sources and websites and apps that have your video embedded or linked.

In the Devices report, you can see what operating system and type of device people are using to view your videos. Devices include computers, smartphones and other mobile devices, TVs, and game consoles. In the report, click on each device type and operating system for additional information for additional details.

Use the age ranges, gender, and geographic location of viewers identified in the Demographics report to get a better understanding of your audience. Select an age group and gender to focus on what a particular demographic is watching. Then add the geography filter to find out where the people in that group are located.