Keeping track of the demographics of your viewer base is crucial to understanding how to maximize the impact of your content. When you integrate YouTube with PowerMetrics, you get access to an even more robust and informative set of analytics to visualize and track your engagement data as it evolves over time.

In this example, we’ll show you how to connect PowerMetrics to your YouTube account. You’ll then learn how to use the query builder in PowerMetrics to retrieve demographic data (view percentage by age group, gender, and subscribed status) and create a modelled data source you can use for your custom YouTube metrics.

This article contains the following sections:

• Finding your demographics metrics in YouTube
• Connecting PowerMetrics to your YouTube account
• Creating your query and modelled data source
• Creating your metric

Finding your demographics metrics in YouTube

In YouTube, you'll find your demographics data in the Channel analytics section of the YouTube Creator Studio, under Audience by age and gender. You can refer to this information to verify your data as it displays in PowerMetrics. See below for an example of data for the demographics metrics that we’ll be tracking in this article:

Now that you know what data we’ll be tracking, let’s connect PowerMetrics to your YouTube account.

Connecting PowerMetrics to your YouTube account

The first step in creating a YouTube data source is to connect PowerMetrics to your data.

To connect PowerMetrics to your YouTube account:

1. In the left navigation sidebar, click your Account Name > Data Sources.
2. Click the Create a New Data Source button.
3. On the Where is your data? page, select YouTube.
4. If this is your first time connecting to YouTube:
   • Click Add new account.
     
   • Enter your Google login credentials and click Allow to enable Klipfolio PowerMetrics to securely access your YouTube data.
   • Next, to further define the data you're looking for, under Choose account settings, select your Channel from the drop-down list. Click Use account.
     
5. If you’ve connected to YouTube before, we assume you want to use the same account and take you directly to the next step - Creating your query and modelled data source. If you want to connect to a different account, you can do so in the query builder by clicking the account connection at the top of the data preview window (see below). You can either select an alternate, existing account or click “Add new account”.
   
   That's all there is to it! You're connected and ready to move on to creating a query and modelled data source.

Creating your query and modelled data source

After connecting your account, the query builder opens. You'll start by choosing a data view. Using that data view, we'll run a query to get a list of available columns from within it. You'll then choose from those columns (and add filters) to specify the data to include in your modelled data source.

To create your query and modelled data source:

1. Under Data view, click the drop-down and select Demographics.
   The Demographics view contains the data for the YouTube demographics metrics you’re going to track. Its contents should mirror what you see in the Channel analytics section of the YouTube Creator Studio.
2. Under Columns, select the following: AgeGroup, Gender, SubscribedStatus, and ViewerPercentage. These columns will be added to your modelled data source, which you’ll use later to create custom metrics. We’ll also select StartDate and EndDate, so we can define the range of data we want to retrieve for our modelled data source. (See below.)
   
3. To define a date range for the data being retrieved, we’ll apply a filter to the StartDate column. Begin, by clicking the filter icon for the StartDate column. (See below.)
   
4. Then, click the Click to add filter box and select Is as the operator. For the value, enter the duration over which you want to measure your data. In this example, we’ll choose 30 days ago.
5. Click the Filter button. Then, click anywhere outside the filter dialog to close it and save the filter. (See below.)
   
   We won’t apply filters to the EndDate column. By default, the EndDate is the current day. The metric will continue to return a snapshot of data based on a duration of the 30 previous days, up to the current day.
   Go here if you want to learn more about filtering in the query builder.
6. Click Preview data.
   Note: Once you have a data preview table, you can optionally apply filters to column headers there (instead of in the left sidebar). Some people prefer that method as they can more easily see their data.
7. Click Save and continue.
8. On the Modify Data page, you can rename the modelled data source. By default, it’s automatically named to match the query. In our example, that's "YoutubeAnalytics Demographics".
   Note: This step is optional but it might help you find the modelled data source later when you want to use it for your custom metrics.
9. Click Save and exit to save your modelled data source.
   The details page for the modelled data source displays. You're ready to use it to create a custom metric.

Creating your metric

The following example describes creating a YouTube Viewers by Demographics metric.

To create your metric:

1. On the details page for the modelled data source, click Create metrics.
   The Create a custom metric page displays. This is where you'll choose the settings for your metric.
   Note: If you closed the modelled data source, you can reopen it by selecting it from your list of data sources (accessed by clicking your Account name > Data Sources in the left navigation sidebar).
2. In the Metric value step, choose ViewerPercentage. This is the column in the modelled data source that contains the values you want to track in your metric. Make sure the default aggregation is set to Sum. Click Next. (See below.)
   
3. In the Segmentation step, select the AgeGroup, Gender, and SubscribedStatus columns. Click Next. (See below.)
   
4. In the Date & time step, choose Use the current date. This option is used when you want the most up-to-date results. Each time your data is refreshed, you get the latest values. (See below.)
   
5. In the Data shape step, select Current Values. This option is used when your data includes current value totals for specific points in time and new values replace older values. Each import gives you the current value, which is the total of all values for the time period. Click Next. (See below.)
   
6. In the Display settings step:
   • Under Metric Name, enter YouTube Viewers by Demographics.
   • Under Format, make sure the data format is Numeric.
   • Under Favourable trend, select Trending up is positive.
     
7. Click Save.

Your YouTube Viewers by Demographics custom metric is added to your list of metrics (accessed by clicking Metrics in the left navigation sidebar). As its modelled data source gets refreshed, new data is added to your metric, enabling you to see trends and compare your data to previous periods.