How to Track Traffic from YouTube to Your Website

Have you ever wondered how to link to your website from your YouTube video? In this article we are going to show you how to use annotations to link from your YouTube video to your website as well as track exactly how much traffic your video is sending to you.

Associated website annotations

Associated website annotations allow you to link from your video to your own website. Many businesses use this very powerful feature to drive traffic to their website. Unfortunately, most marketers don’t track the links and end up with no idea as to how much traffic is coming to their site from YouTube. Let’s find out how you can track the number of visitors you are getting to your website via your YouTube channel.

How to track clicks from YouTube annotations to your site

To track clicks from your YouTube video annotations, simply add a Google Analytics parameter or tracking strings your website URL as part of your annotations. By doing this you can tell your Analytics package where the traffic came from, what video it came from and even what part of the video it came from.

How to create Google Analytics tracking strings for your YouTube annotations

Google Analytics tracking strings might look daunting, but they are really quite simple to create. If you are using Google Analytics you can use their URL builder, which you can find here. Simply type in your URL, the parameters you would like to use for your strings (“parameters” is just a fancy way of saying “variables” or “guidelines”), click “submit” and Voila! you have a URL that you can use for your annotations.

What does this mean to you?

Tracking clicks from your YouTube videos to your website helps you identify which videos are creating more value for you. You will be able to see which videos/content types people are watching and actually engaging with, and which ones that are maybe getting a lot of views but are not necessarily converting viewers into customers. Here are just a few data points that you can collect by using Google Analytics tracking strings in your YouTube annotations. Which annotation served the click – You might have more than one annotation in your video; you can find out which one the visitor clicked. The exact video that served the link – Of course, you have a lot of videos on your channel. You can use tracking strings to see which exact video served sent the visitor to your website. With which part of the video are your viewers engaging – Tracking visitors in this way gives you data about how effective your annotations are for you and thus will help you make better videos next time. So, what are you waiting for? Use the tips above and find out today how many visitors come from YouTube to your website. Interested in more helpful information about video marketing?  Read our blog.