This article outlines recommendations and notes certain limitations imposed by the data source API, which you may need to consider when building your queries.
If you’re connecting to YouTube, follow the instructions in our connection guide. See YouTube metrics and dimensions for the fields available in this data source.
Request limits and recommended refresh rate
Request limit: 20,000 requests per user per day. Resets at midnight, Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8).
Recommended refresh window: 2-3 days
Historical range
There are no known limitations to the YouTube data source. It should fetch from the beginning of the account's lifetime. Note that some query types, such as Videos Performance, only fetch the last 1000 videos published.
Accounts in YouTube
In the YouTube connector, each Channel is considered a separate account within the connection.
Your Supermetrics subscription determines the number of data source accounts you can use simultaneously.
Things to consider
Monetization metrics
While we support some monetization metrics (what income you made from running ads on your channel), if you’re looking for data on your own YouTube ad performance, use other connectors that specialize in this, such as Google Ads, Google Display & Video 360, or similar.
To get monetization data, you need to be a content owner or have monetization enabled for your account.
The default currency of the Estimated revenue metric is USD.
Video publish date
The field that we are using from the YouTube Data API says that for private or unlisted videos, the publish date may be the upload date. See YouTube’s documentation for more information.
Subscriber count discrepancies
For Google to do engagement verification, subscriber counts may be delayed up to 48 hours. See Google’s documentation.
Google also rounds the subscriber counts down to the nearest 3 significant figures. See Google’s documentation.
Channel Totals metric limitation
Important metrics for the Channel Totals query type are Channel subscribers, Channel videos, and Channel views. These metrics must not be aggregated by any of the date dimensions. They show a snapshot at the request time.
The error message will be thrown if you will try to aggregate them by date dimensions: Unfortunately, channel totals metrics like channel subscribers, channel videos, channel views can not be aggregated by date dimensions
These metrics should be used either as standalone metrics or aggregated by channel.
Traffic sources types don’t match
It’s a known issue that the values the API returns for the Traffic source type dimension don’t align with the YouTube UI values.
Using US State dimension in Geographies query type
The YouTube Analytics and Reporting API has a limitation that you can only get data for the state field by filtering for Country = US.
To fetch US state-level data with Supermetrics, add a country filter for the US to the query. See YouTube’s documentation.