In order to be successful in social media you have to understand what your audience likes. In an effort to help you drive more engagement to your YouTube Channel, the company provides you with more in-depth analytics for how viewers are watching your videos.

YouTube has enhanced the “Views” report to give you additional insight into watched data. This means that you will now be able to see how many minutes a video was watched in total. If your videos aren’t returning the level of engagement you had hoped, knowing when a viewer stops watching will be valuable information.

The company also launched a beta version of its Annotations report. YouTube annotations are one of the most popular ways to drive audience engagement. WIth the new report, you can track how annotations are performing — specially viewer clicks and close rates.

Other improvements include the return of the date slider, which lets you see how your videos performed across different time periods, and video hovercards, which display a thumbnail of your video and basic information when you hover over your video link.

According to YouTube’s blog post, these features have been in the works for the last few months, so it’s possible some people already had access. To access your YouTube Analytics, sign into your account, click on your username, and select Video Manager. From there, click Analytics in the top navigation bar.

[Image credit: kliverap]