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:
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.