NOTE: Certain information in this article may be missing or out of date. We are in the process of updating the content.
Overview
YouTube allows you to share videos with the world and build your audience. With Grow, you can visualize, monitor, and analyze your most relevant video management data, including video performance, channel views, subscribers, and more.
How to Connect
Before you get started you will need your Google login information.
- First, log in to your Grow account. Press Add Metric, then select YouTube from the list of data sources and click Connect.
- You will be asked to sign in with your Google account.
- After you have signed in, you will need to grant Grow access to your YouTube data. Press the Allow button.
And that's it! You are good to go.
Endpoints
YouTube does not have any “set” reports. Any reports that pull data from YouTube are created using a combination of metrics and dimensions. This makes the reports pretty dynamic, but it also makes it a little tricky to make sense of. Here’s what a YouTube report is made of.
- Metrics are measurements of user activity (such as video view counts and likes/dislikes), ad performance, or earnings.
- Dimensions are the criteria you use to aggregate data, such as dates or location of a user’s activity. It explains how the metric information will be grouped.
If you want to learn more about report parameters in YouTube, they have a helpful article here that you can reference.
FAQs + Tips and Tricks
Experiencing Data Delays
Your most recent data (last few days) maybe missing or have discrepancies due to delays. Youtube has confirmed that these delays may occur within the first few days of accessing data. Per their documentation: “Data is available daily, but can have a delay of a few days."
How does filtering work in YouTube?
Filters identify dimension values that must be present in the retrieved data set. Using filters narrows down the data you get back further. (For example, instead of pulling users by country, you could filter it to only show users from a specific country.)
In Grow, you can specify specific dimensions to filter by. This Google Analytics document gives you the list of filter operators, which you can use in YouTube. (Note: this is for Google Analytics, but you can use the same operators when creating filter expressions in YouTube.)
Max Results
YouTube usually requires max results field and a dimension to sort by. If you are having issues pulling in data try adding those.
Setting up the Query
YouTube has some documentation that might help you find ways to build a report in Grow. Check out this article to see a list of common use cases and the request parameters (metrics, dimensions, and filters) that you can recreate in Grow to pull in the information.
How to get Total Subscribers
In order to get the total number of subscribers to your Youtube account you'll need to pull in the metrics "subscribersGained" and "subscribersLost" for the entire period of time that your account has been active. You can do this by selecting the metrics "subscribersGained" and "subscribersLost" and then in the Date section select "Custom Date". Then fill out the 'Since' section with {{date(,'YYYY-MM-DD')}} where the YYYY-MM-DD is the day your account was activated, and the 'Until' section with {{date('YYYY-MM-DD')}}. Then use the Calculated Columns transform to subtract "subscribersLost" from "subscribersGained" to get your Total Subscribers.
