YouTube’s effort to remain the dominate force in streaming video received a nice boost today with its upgrade of the legacy-driven “Insights”.

The old Insights dashboard which provide somewhat rudimentary data such as number of video views, geographic preferences and how viewers found your video has been significantly enhanced – both in how the data is presented, but also what type of data is provided.

Take a look at the new YouTube Analytics dashboard:

The first thing you’ll notice is that the data is presented in a similar manner to Google Analytics (I’m still unsure why they don’t straight-port GA’s functionality to YouTube, but that’s for another day to discuss).

What I’m really digging is the “engagement section” which shows you how many video likes/dislikes you’ve received, along with comments, shares and favorites. This type of engagement data is more in tune with social media’s role in the discovery of video.

You’ll also find data on how the videos are being watched… be it on a mobile device, embedded player on a website other than YouTube, and so on.

The entire suite of analytic data is just fantastic. Plus, you can select a host of date ranges for analysis (including custom ranges) through a more intuitive data selector). Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Views – let’s you examine how many views your videos are receiving
• Demographics – gender and geo data
• Playback Locations – YouTube vs. embedded players, mobile, etc.
• Traffic Sources – how folks are discovering your videos
• Retention (a favorite of mine, somewhat unique to video) – shows how people drop off your video over time