Generate a Youtube Analytics Dashboard

7:48

Ever wanted to see stats from Youtube, Google Analytics/Ads, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, or other social media sites all in one place?

Well, we're starting to add content to our own Youtube channel at Basedash and we realized that the dashboard we'd made internally in 10 minutes was a great demo dataset for showing off how building (if you can call it that) in Basedash works. No need to understand the schema, write SQL, or even know what those things are. Basedash automatically makes the data warehouse, writes the queries, picks the data and visualization, and lets you track what you care about without needing to be technical. The best part? You can share, embed, collaborate, and yes, even chat, with your data for questions about all of it together. You've got to try it.

Transcript

Hey, Tom here from Basedash. I just got off a call about marketing and growth, and I realized I created this dashboard for YouTube views in Basedash.

We had some YouTube data—we're starting to upload videos. Maybe we’ll upload this one to YouTube to show how to track that data over time.

I created a dashboard and realized this is really good demo content because it’s all public and I don’t really care if other people see it. Product data, on the other hand, I can’t really show. Let me show you how to create this in Basedash.

Connecting to YouTube Data

So real quick—

We have YouTube hooked up to our data warehouse.

You can connect YouTube and create a Basedash test account if you want to mess around here.

We also have a bunch of other connections in here, but I’ve already got YouTube hooked up.

Creating the Dashboard

I’ll go ahead and create a new dashboard and call it YouTube.

Voice Queries via Willow Voice

I’m using Willow Voice for this, so I’ll just talk into my mic:

“Show me the growth of YouTube views over time.”
“Show me subscriber count for my YouTube channel over time.”
“Show me a list of all my YouTube videos with their view count, publish date, and title, as well as a column showing how many comments are on each video.”

I'll let those three generate. Let’s add a few more.

Making Adjustments

Cumulative Views

For YouTube video views growth, I want to make it cumulative instead of just showing a snapshot.
Basedash asks for clarification if it can’t determine something from your data.
It said we need a table with periodic subscriber counts—that should be in the YouTube data source somewhere.

YouTube Video List

Here's my YouTube videos list.
For example: the Unicorn Studio video has views and comments data—looks good.

Breaking Down Views by Video

For the views over time, I want to break this down by video name.
Moving things around… looks like one chart didn’t generate right.
That one was supposed to be Subscribers Over Time. I’ll archive it and try again:
- “Show me subscriber growth for my YouTube channel over time, cumulatively.”

More Insights

Average View Duration

“Show me average view duration over time broken down by video for my YouTube channel.”

I don’t see a time series table for subscriber count—let me dig into that.

Navigating the Schema

Inside of Basedash, I can search for YouTube analytics. It’s buried a bit.

I’m not sure where the subscriber count data lives.
If I can’t find the time series data, I’ll just try:
- “Show me the total number of subscribers.”

That query should work.

Refining the Dashboard

Back to the dashboard:

The average view duration by video looks good.
I want that to be a time bar. Same for the YouTube view growth over time.

For the subscriber count, it’s not right. It says I have 0 subscribers… I know I have 21.

Oh! It’s looking at the wrong channel.

Correcting the Channel Context

It was showing the Tom Johnson personal channel, not the Basedash YouTube channel.

When you create a YouTube integration, there's the personal channel and the team one. It chose the wrong one.

So I’m going to fix that:

Go to the YouTube Analytics data source
Edit the description:
“Always use the Basedash channel as the source of truth. The personal Tom Johnson channel is not to be used.”

Done.

Now it shows 85 subscribers. That sounds right. I check another screen—yep, now we have 86 subscribers (we gained one since the warehouse last synced).

Final Dashboard Overview

Now the dashboard includes:

✅ YouTube video growth over time
✅ YouTube videos list
✅ Average view duration
✅ Subscriber count
✅ More metrics soon...

Advanced Analytics: UTM Tracking

I want to take it a step further:

“Show me the number of visitors to our website over time that have come with the YouTube UTM code (from Google Analytics).”

There’s a link in our YouTube channel that uses UTM codes pointing to our website.

Let’s see if that works.

Marketing Dashboard Potential

One cool thing is we can pull all marketing data into a single dashboard:

YouTube Analytics
Google Ads (e.g. ad spend over time)
Google Analytics (website visitors)
LinkedIn Ads (if we’re running them)

We can aggregate all our marketing data together.

Granular Tracking and Funnels

You could go even further:

Break down YouTube visitors by viewport (if data is available).
Build a funnel:
- Watched a YouTube video
- Visited our website
- Signed up
- Became a paid user

Pretty crazy.