Month: December 2015

Rising Views + Falling Traffic – Is Youtube a Good Source of Website Traffic?

Update…

I think I figured out the problem. I just read that https sites (Youtube) can’t send referral data to http sites (my site).

https://vickeryhill.com/blog/google-analytics-referral-data-loss/

Update…

I used to get referral traffic from Youtube, but I hardly do anymore according to Google Analytics. Here’s a look at how it’s falling:

September 24-October 23 (Google Analytics)
This is my traffic from Youtube over the last 5 years with the amount of views on Youtube.
 2016: 4 referrals (36,000 Youtube views)
 2015: 5 referrals (25,000 views)
 2014: 44 referrals (15,000 views)
 2013: 196 referrals (19,000 views)
 2012: 327 referrals (11,000 views)
Traffic went from 327-4 referrals and I had 3X the views on Youtube that I used to get when I got 80X the traffic.
I joined Youtube in 2011. I have currently over a 1,000,000 views and 4,000 sub. I have more videos than before, but I don’t get it… I have less traffic.
I don’t think I changed much.
Is the traffic calculated somewhere else? I use cards, linked annotations plus links in the descriptions.
Or has something else changed? Is there a new trend? Have people stopped clicking through to websites?
Ironically I also made more money a month when I had 11-19,000 views compared to now.
Old article…

Recently I was searching for the answer to this question. And I didn’t really find much that answered my questions, so that’s why I am putting this out there.

This is based on my experience using Youtube for the last 6 years. The first channel that I started has just a few videos on it. One video has over 150,000 views.

The second channel has a total of over 1,000,000 views with about 190 videos. It has more than 4,000 subscribers.

So how much referral traffic do I get from Youtube? You would think with numbers like those you would get some traffic. Well Google Analytics is confusing and it frequently changes.

Last month I only had 9 visitors to my site from Youtube according to GA and 22,400 views on Youtube. Doesn’t sound like much eh? Well on a positive note, those users ended up spending 14 minutes and visiting 8+ pages which is pretty high.

I wonder if the Youtube traffic is calculated somewhere else too.

A year ago on the same date I had 28 visitors from Youtube and 14,000 views on Youtube. 2 years ago I had 152 visitors on the same month and 16,300 views on Youtube. 3 years ago I had 359 visitors from Youtube and 12,300 views on Youtube.

This is confusing for me. I am getting more views on my channels, but less traffic to my website. Why? I don’t think I really changed much.

So based on the numbers I am currently getting it sure doesn’t seem to be. I am wondering if the links in the video are calculated elsewhere?

I found this post on MOZ about Youtube traffic and that very few actually come to your website and it is more of a good place for brand awareness than it is traffic.