YouTube is known for the billions of hours of video it shares, and the billions of dollars it pays out to IP rights holders including its famous and not-so-famous Creators aka YouTube Stars.
Less known, and literally behind the scenes are three APIs that are available for public use. They are the Data, Analytics and Reporting APIs. You can access these (and many other) APIs via Google’s Developers Console. [Accounts, projects and credentials need to be setup and processing limits and fees may apply.]
It’s critical important that you know the power of these three APIs because they could totally change the way you think about driving engagement, community activation and KPI measurement using video (even if you leave the details to developers).
Imagine hundreds or thousands of stakeholder using a branded smartphone or web application to take, annotate, and upload hour after hour of video, and all of the engagement across the PESO model you could drive… and automating all of that plus all the data collection for your KPIs; that’s the power of the YouTube APIs.
I explore all of this in more in this weeks’ episode of Youtubular C0nversation. There are links at the bottom of this page to all of the APIs, and other sites I mentioned.
The following “show notes & transcript” were created by Auphonic working with the Google Translation API. For demonstration purposes, the following transcription has not been edited by any human! I have also included at the bottom wave forms of the before & after files.
100% of the formatting, and the complete transcription was automated. The other text was taken from the input fields within Auphonic.
— start of Auphonic generated ‘show notes’ —
Using The Youtube Api To Drive Community Activation And Kpi Measurement
YouTube is a great service for uploading and sharing video. If you need to get a large number of stakeholders uploading and sharing video or creating playlists the YouTube API could be of great help.
YouTube has 3 different APIs (Data, Analytics & Reporting) which together can allow you to create applications that help create video, or facilitate video sharing, or gather meaningful metrics around those activities. You can use the YouTube API to gather metrics automatically, or to add YouTube metrics 3rd party systems, applications and processes.
Transcript
[0:00] Hello this is Harry Hawk and this is another episode of youtubular conversations on the fir.
[0:08] Podcast Network today I wanted to talk about the YouTube.
API YouTube API eyes are very powerful there’s three of them but let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page API,
stands for application programming interface and it’s simply away typically in real time to allow one.
Programmer application server database or system to talk to,
another you may create a application maybe lives on a smartphone or on a webpage or maybe on a private proprietary piece of software that you run inside of Microsoft.
And you allow folks to search for videos you could use the Google or rather YouTube API to enable that private,
application to search,
for those YouTube videos without actually having the user go to YouTube and then presumably once they found the video that they were looking for they would be able to play it that’s just one very narrow,
[1:15] What I want to start with in thinking about all the ways that we can use this is just point out that YouTube does have a bunch of pages that are aimed at,
different stakeholders and they have one that’s aimed at developers and I’m going to provide a link to it but they have a Showcase of what they call amazing apps built with YouTube built with the YouTube a.
The eye when we talk about YouTube API there really is more than one until there are three of them I’m going to briefly describe them.
[1:45] And then we’ll talk about them as well the three are the data API the analytics API and the reporting API now the day the one you might think is about getting.
Information or something but the data API is more less the most basic when I first,
became aware of it in teaching my e-commerce class for Southwestern College and San Diego the students wear building,
working with e-commerce servers is an option in Magento to include videos in a product as well as pictures and so forth and if you.
[2:26] Insert the property from YouTube when people are building their store they can actually include,
YouTube videos and what it does is when the URL is given not only does it enable the store to play the video,
all the metadata comes in with it meaning the description of the video the thumbnail and so forth so it makes it really easy to import all of that data in short as YouTube describes it the,
data API allows you to play YouTube videos and it allows you to search YouTube content upload videos.
Create and manage playlist and more so you could have a corporate event where you have a bunch of folks who are creating videos,
they may be streaming and real-time and at the end of that,
livestream you may want to turn that into a permanent video so the software that was managing all of that could handle that automatically but imagine that you had a,
bunch of other folks who are some streaming live and some recording.
[3:33] All throughout your event if each person uploaded those to your corporate site or simply save them on a core,
server or a little bit more complex imagine that the software people at your event the software that they were using was actually your app,
so what say you have a hundred people using this app going through the crowds and just recording some people record three or four seconds others minutes other folks are recording.
Much longer pieces as each of those the speed recorded and once the recording is complete your app,
could have then shared it to your server and then software that you’ve written at that point could put all of them up to YouTube with all of the metadata,
coming from the app in fact we don’t even need to go to this intermediate server the app could simply at the time that the video was being recorded,
at the end could simply push it all up to YouTube,
I mentioned the idea of an intermediate server cuz I can imagine in a Communications focused world we might want to vet and look at and review some of the video,
before we just ship it off to the world but that’s an example of what we could do with the day that API the analytics API let you retrieve data it’s meant for real time,
queries and to generate a custom Reese.
Reports based on that so if you were a large company that had maybe several different YouTube channels and you had a corporate dashboard and you wanted folks within the company or.
[5:11] Potentially even other stakeholders,
external stakeholders are vendors tool to search through the that video and have access not only to the video but the data that surrounds it that would be possible again in real time using the Analytics,
API and then the reporting API is more or less the same but the idea is that you are downloading the data.
[5:36] And you’re storing it either locally or in your own cloud and that then you would run your own queries and so forth on it on your side I don’t want to go too far down this whole data and Reporting and query.
[5:51] Rabbit hole but I think this is one of the things that makes YouTube so powerful not only are all of this free hosting available but obviously this.
The state as well and I think one of the areas where the data could come into really have a lot of importance is around,
tpi’s measurement and analytics so for example if we’re building a Communications plan and that plan involves video and let’s imagine that includes some video or all of that video with end up on,
YouTube then we need to have some reporting for that and if,
imagine again we made an app that allowed individual stakeholders to record video so and potentially uploaded to their own account we could start to lose track of all of that right because it’s going to their account and we wouldn’t necessarily be assured,
of knowing if it got plate or not or how many times you got shared and so forth now we should be able to if a user is using this,
custom app to upload to their YouTube channel to retain the permissions needed,
to access the data around that channel so that’s often you know when you’re installing an app and they’re asking you for permission that’s often one of the.
Ones that you’re agreeing to but even imagining,
just a simpler World we’re all of the one or more YouTube channels are company on there still a lot of data that we might want to pull back as part of the measurement as.
[7:27] The communications plan we’re moving beyond kind of vanity metrics metrics that don’t have real meaningful impact on the business is a variety of data that all of these API scan retrieve and allow you to access how this can include,
measurements related and I’m quoting here user activity at performance,
estimated revenue on and user activity metrics include things like video counts and ratings likes and dislikes and there are dimensions.
Criteria such as and again including the date on which an action occurred or the country.
[8:03] Where are the uses for located so for example if we’re having a major event around her company it’s a worldwide event folks are uploading video all around the world and celebration of our event it’s not just enough to know,
how many times a video was played or shared or so for it could also be very important to know where what country.
[8:25] And so forth examples that their listing here include the channel name associated with the activity,
the particular video when it was alive or streamed meaning on demand,
and of the subscriber status this is I think a real important example that we can think about in terms of a communication plan,
rub loading videos to YouTube to the several of our company channels we’re trying to measure engagement we might look at total minutes played,
total unique plays but then we might want to look at during the campaign how many.
Subscribes did we get an unsubscribed and overtime how many people who were watching or subscribed in other words and and some people may anonymously view even though they are subscribed plaid.
If we do have this amazing engaged and interested Community we will see more and more people over time not only watching,
the watching while they are subscribed to the channel and obviously a certain activities happen certain messages went out if we saw a,
ratchet people unsubscribe from the channel that could also be a real,
important metric to understand as were going through this and and and thinking about metrics and so forth again I’m going to have links to some of these Pages obviously these are technical pages,
if you’re not a developer you’re probably going to want at the velcro to do work for you and examples might be.
[9:59] Pulling some of this data into a measurement package for example pointed into Google analytics although those.
Programs YouTube and Google analytics to work well together you may have another program that you want to bring that data into into a corporate dashboard for example on open source measurement.
[10:19] Program like pilot Beyond analytics there may be an opportunity to bring some of this.
Data into applications like customer relationship Management systems part of that I think would depend on if you’re able to identify the activities of individual viewers and through,
are there additional sources that may be possible but in general some of the major metrics and dimensions here,
again there are subscribes likes and shares it can all be monitored again gains and losses we can look at the time spent watching we can look at,
estimated Revenue including partner Revenue we can look at duration but there are opportunities to annotate video and to create,
informational cards so there’s click-through rates on those those can also be a retrieve,
we can look at the number of times a video was viewed by YouTube Red members.
So that’s their premium subscriber system we can look at the number of viewers who are logged in or subscribe,
we can look at duration as I mentioned and duration percentage we can look at none only a subscribers lost and gained we can look at videos that,
has been added to a playlist now that maybe your own company adding it to the playlist but individual users and.
Who have their own channels can add your video to their playlist that could also be a really good metric if that was part of the.
[11:50] Activation strategy you can see the number of times a playlist has been started.
You can see if playlist 7 safe to remove the annotations that come up all of the related Impressions and click-throughs and so forth and the same for,
the cards.
The curate’s and teaser Impressions and so forth and then there are and Screen metrics with the end of the video you can have links and so forth clicks Impressions click-through rate audience retention metrics.
Again if you are using a the monetization features of YouTube is a lot of Revenue,
data I’m skipping over that for the most part and then add performance metrics which is related if you are running ads on the channel,
there’s an awful lot of other information that could be really valuable again to pull into,
reports that you’re doing playback locations traffic sources the type of device and operating system few were demographics all of that information is out there and available and want to look at a couple others here if we can look at not only all of that data,
but further demographic information such as age and geography provincial codes or,
country codes so when we say provincial that might be in the state of Texas where a Canadian province the kind of playback would let you know where the video was played if it was directly in YouTube or if it was embedded somewhere else again I’ve mentioned live or on-demand when I mention the traffic source.
[13:30] How the person found the ad and where that video may have appeared did they see it on your homepage and so forth but they searching for it I’d like to wrap up this video thinking about the larger picture,
there are many private video services like Vimeo and wistia which allow private companies to upload video.
And really control all of that video will be exploring some of those I’m not limiting the conversation on this channel just to YouTube,
and so there’s lots of reasons in marketing or a marketer wants to control what happens after video is watch,
and have access to a lot of Rich data and,
that may encourage them to have selected a system like whiskey up or Vimeo for hosting and streaming their video but.
Let me think about communication engagement community and stakeholder there’s a huge value in an able in our communities of interest to access.
Are messages on YouTube to help us create video messages and to.
Share them with us and with each other you can just imagine how complex that is if we look at a large company that may in a single day activate the sharing of,
hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of video we could imagine.
[14:53] Just all of the video that we shared in the last few days around the inauguration of the 45th president and chauffeur.
A lot of this data you could have interns and folks logging into YouTube and recording this data into spreadsheets I don’t know if truly all of the data is available.
I think there’s a lot that you would have to dig for but there’s some that would be on third parties.
[15:21] Again as he mentioned individual May upload a YouTube video,
about your brand to their own site and if they had done that I threw your application but you didn’t use any of the further API Services then you might not have access to,
the metrics and so forth in recording all of that data is also a possibility of someone is,
reading the screen and putting it into a spreadsheet that they could get some of that data wrong,
so there is certainly a lot of information on that it makes sense to automate the collection of that data and automate the reporting think of all the data that’s available and how you could make that available to the stakeholders in a meaningful way,
think of all the data that could be incorporated into a Google analytics and other similar programs and where you can identify.
Individual users and these maybe Channel owners what you’re more identifiable.
Then individual video players but building information into customer relationship.
[16:22] Management Systems we don’t often see customer relationship Management systems involved in Communications but imagine if you were using a customer relationship management tool,
to keep track of YouTube channel partners.
And you really wanted to manage and tickle your staff meeting set reminders to contact them and to be in touch and to coach them and to help them and those are all.
Activities that relationship Management systems are fantastic.
[16:55] At supporting you could then with the right set of permissions whole all of their activity.
[17:02] Into that customer relationship management tool and combined with other tools like a marketing automation,
an email messaging Branch an email with marker is referred to as drip email there’s all kinds of possibilities of creating really high value.
[17:19] Engagement Focus Communications plans and then using a YouTube data.
To support those programs I hope I haven’t scared you away I promise that the next episode of youtubular conversations will not be as geeky and as technical but I think a lot of people.
Look at YouTube as a place to watch video or the,
upload video but they don’t understand all of the data and reporting that is available around that and how easy it is to access it again,
using API themselves may not be that straightforward if you’re not super technical but you can certainly engage people on your behalf.
To do the programming for you what’s important is to have the vision.
And the information on how to use systems and programs like YouTube and the data.
And how you can use that to feed into your measurement your monitoring into customer and stakeholder reporting.
[18:18] And as I’ve just mentioned and how you can bring that into.
Other systems like relationship Management Systems so that you can put your resources out where they’re most needed.
Encouraging the people who were doing the most and the most valued video sharing and coaching the folks who aren’t quite there yet.
So that they can become better shares better video creators and all of that,
this is Harry Hawk and you have been listening to youtubular conversations on the fir podcast Network I highly recommend you check out,
fir podcast network.com take a look at all the shows that are out there it’s a great resource.
Where you can look around and search and go back and find some of the past episodes you maybe,
looking into something a researching and one of the amazing hosts on the network may have already created a whole episode around something that you are,
just now becoming interested in and so will I,
encourage you to listen to the shows as they come out definitely think about using the FR podcast Network repository of shows has one of those places that you go to do.
Research I hope everybody has a great week bye bye.
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