YouTube Analytics: Setup guide

This guide explains how to collect data from YouTube Analytics.

Introduction

For a list of the fields that you can collect from YouTube Analytics, see YouTube Analytics.

Limitations

Collecting data from YouTube Analytics comes with the following limitations:

• The data of YouTube Analytics is made available daily, but a delay of a few days may occur. For more information, see the YouTube Analytics documentation.

• Some data may only be available to specific roles and permissions. For example, users with the viewers role may not retrieve data from certain features of YouTube Studio. For more information, see the YouTube documentation.

• YouTube Analytics data has a delay of approximately 48-72 hours for updates. This means the most recent data might not be immediately available.

• For Bulk report types, historical data is only available for up to 30 days in the past, while daily reports can access data for the last 60 days.

• Some metrics like impressions are not available via the YouTube Analytics API.

• To collect yesterday’s data accurately, you need to use an offset of -1 day when configuring your date range.

Prerequisites

Before you start collecting data from Mailgun, perform all of the following actions:

• Ensure your account is assigned at least the role Viewer or has higher permissions. For more information on user permissions, see the YouTube documentation.

Creating a datastream to collect data from YouTube Analytics

The basics of creating a datastream to collect data from any data source are explained in our guide to Collecting data in Adverity. This guide contains information about the specific steps to create a datastream to fetch data from YouTube Analytics.

Configuration: Choose the data you want to collect from YouTube Analytics

To choose what data to collect and customize the YouTube Analytics datastream configuration, follow these steps:

1. (Optional) Rename your datastream.

2. In Data Type, select one of the following options:

   • Select Channel Report to collect data for a channel connected to your account.

   • Select Content Owner to collect data for a channel created by other content owners. When this option is selected, enter the respective ID in the Content owner ID field that appears below.

3. In Report type, select the type of data to collect from YouTube Analytics. For more information on the report types, see Understanding data types, report types and reports.

4. In Report, select the specific report to collect from YouTube Analytics.

5. In Channels, select the channels for which to collect data. If you do not select any items in a drop-down list, Adverity collects data for all items in the drop-down list.

6. In Dimensions and Metrics, change the list of fields that you want to see in your data extract.

7. In Insight traffic source type, select the traffic type for which you want to collect data. For more information, see the Google documentation.

8. In Sorting, select how to sort the collected data.

9. In Filter expression, enter filters to be applied when collecting data. For more information on using filters, see the YouTube Analytics documentation.

10. In Video IDs, select a value table that contains the video IDs that you want to use in the filter.

What’s next?

• Apply Data Mapping to your collected data to harmonize data collected from different sources in Adverity.

• Transform your data to meet your needs by creating and applying transformations to your datastream.

• Load your data into Explore & Present to visualize your data in Adverity.

• Load your data into an external destination of your choice.

Advanced YouTube Analytics tips

Understanding data types, report types and reports

You can retrieve different data from a YouTube Analytics datastream depending on how you configure three different settings: Data type, report type and report. To configure these settings, go to the Settings tab of your YouTube Analytics datastream overview.

Data type

Select one of the following options:

• Channel Report to collect data for channels connected to your account (channels you have Administrator permission for).

• Content Owner to collect data for channels created by other content owners that you have Ad Manager permission for. When this option is selected, enter the Content owner ID of the channels on which you want to collect data in the field that appears below.

Report type

There are three different report types. The following list explains the report types in detail:

• Select Bulk report type to obtain data for more combinations of dimensions and metrics. Data is typically delayed by 48-72 hours to ensure quality. For daily reports, you can retrieve data for the last 60 days. For historical data reports, you can only retrieve data for the last 30 days. Data older than these periods is not available through the API. For more information, see the YouTube Reporting API documentation.

• Select Video Reports to retrieve data for videos. For more information, see Video reports for Channel Report data type and Video report for Content Owner data type in the YouTube Analytics documentation.

• Select Playlist Reports to retrieve data for a specific playlist. For more information, see Playlist reports for Channel Report data type and Playlist reports for Content Owner data type in the YouTube Analytics documentation.

Content owner ID

For the Content Owner data type, enter the ID of the content owner of the channel for which you want to collect data. You need to have Ad Manager permission for the channel to collect data.

To get the content owner ID for a channel, follow these steps:

1. Go to https://www.youtube.com/analytics.

2. Switch to the account for which you want to get the ID. The content owner ID is in the page URL between these values: https://www.youtube.com/analytics?o= and &ar.

Report

In this field, different options are available depending on the selected Data type and Report type. A report specifies what dimensions and metrics you retrieve from the data source. For more information on the specification of reports, see the YouTube Analytics documentation:

• Channel reports

• Content owner reports

Troubleshooting

Missing Video IDs

Some video IDs may occasionally be missing from your fetched data. This is a known issue with the YouTube API that affects all users. The missing video IDs may appear in subsequent fetches, while other IDs may be missing instead. This issue must be fixed by YouTube.

Subscriber count discrepancies

YouTube changed how subscriber counts are reported. For channels with more than 1,000 subscribers, counts are rounded down to three significant figures. For example, if a channel has 123,456 subscribers, the API will report 123,000.

Negative values for likes and dislikes

Negative values such as -1 for likes or dislikes indicate that users removed their previous engagement (un-liked or un-disliked).

Partnership Program status errors

If you receive the error “We could not retrieve the selected metrics. Please verify your Youtube Partnership Program status [Forbidden]”, it means that YouTube has restricted access to ad-related metrics because no ads were purchased in a certain period. To resolve this, remove the ad-related metrics from your datastream configuration.