We are pleased to announce an important update to YouTube metrics. This is the first iteration, focusing on the deep-level metrics on the video level, including a historic development of a single video. The second iteration will soon follow, introducing metrics on the Channel and Playlist level. It is safe to say that thanks to this improvement, we match metrics available on YouTube itself, putting quintly at the forefront of social media analytics tools when it comes to YouTube. Let's dive in.

Process

Working with YouTube analytics on video level always came with caveats. The sheer amount of data that each video contains and the API limitations only allowed us to perform a snapshot analysis (data snap from the time requested). The process also caused occasional timeouts via Youtube API. It was virtually impossible to get data on many videos in a single request due to YouTube’s limitations.

Having all of those challenges on hand, we have decided to completely rethink how we handle the private stats on the video level. We have opted for storing the data in our data layer. This route has completely reshaped how and what kind of data will be accessible to you and at an astonishing speed.

Data

This update has created and updated data sources: 

• youtubeAnalyticsVideos - private-level aggregated data on videos created within the selected time period.
• youtubeAnalyticsTopVideos - [UPDATE] private-level data of the top videos within the channel from the selected time period. The update removes any previous limitations of a maximum of 200 videos.
• youtubeAnalyticsVideosTimeSeries - interval-based private-level data (daily, weekly, monthly) for each video.

Behind each of those, there is a massive volume of organized records that is time-based. Each of those data sources would have different use cases ranging from 10 best performing videos over time to performance of the video for the 30 first days.

What's next

With this update, we have finally closed the gap for historical data for YouTube single videos. There was so much performance work done to handle this sheer amount, so we are confident that our clients will find this in-depth analytics very useful. As mentioned above, the first batch of default metrics has already been delivered, you can find them here and here. The second iteration of this analytics, including Channel and Playlist data, will follow shortly.

We are looking forward to your feedback and your use cases. We are really pleased with this update.