Q:“How can I see how much traffic my site gets?”
When you sign in to your channel, you're taken to the Admin area's Account page. Under Statistics, select "View Channel Usage History" and you'll see the traffic overview page.
Q:“What information can I get from this section?”
First, notice that there are two drop down boxes at the top of the statistics--their default setting shows you the Overview for the past 15 days. You can change Overview to Traffic Statistics, Traffic Details or Usage Statistics and change the timeline to view from 15 days to today, yesterday, 3 days, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or from site creation.
There are three categories on the Overview page; Impressions, Total Posts and User Logins. The numbers in those columns tell you how many times the site was viewed in total, how many posts of any kind were submitted, and how many sign ins there were, on a particular day.
If you move to the Traffic Statistics page, you'll see Sessions, Page Views, Video Views and Widget Views. The sessions number gives you a better idea of what people are doing when they visit the site. The other numbers let you know how many pages they visit, videos they watch and widgets they view while they're there. If you have 12 sessions and 12 video views, then you know that either a couple of people are viewing videos and the others aren't or maybe each of them is viewing one video and then leaving the site. On the other hand, if you have 12 sessions and 144 video views, then probably users are viewing a fair number of video before leaving.
Under Usage Statistics, you can view the number of User posts, Anonymous posts, Comments, new User signups and User returns for a given day.
The Traffic Details page breaks down the Overview page information, separating the Crawler sessions, pages and videos from the total numbers. Crawler numbers count the times a web crawler, like the Google search engine, has found a page or video.
Q:“Why are some of the categories listed at zero for the first few months of my site's history?”
Some of these statistics we've been counting since site creation but others have been added over time. If you request a report for a period in which some of the statistics are not available, those columns will show a zero.
Q:“I'd like to view more in depth tracking data for my channel and my adsense account. Is there an easy way to get that information?”
Yes! You can use an external analytics package, like Google Analytics, and put a tracking code in your header or footer. If you use Adwords already, just click the analytics tab in your adsense account to get started. If you choose a program like Google Analytics, you'll have access to over 80 reports giving you information about the exact habits of your viewers, what browser they're using, and where they lose interest and leave or what catches their attention and leads them further into the site.
