A Google Sheets Add-on for YouTube

Video advertising on YouTube is a great way to tell your story and engages with a broad audience. However, to keep your online brand safe on YouTube and avoid any negative associations with your ad, make sure to consider its placement on YouTube.

Although Google is making huge strides to exclude controversial content, it’s still possible for the wrong kind of video to end up next to your YouTube ad. AdWords gives us great tools to analyze the videos that our ads show against, but it’s not always easy for a typical user to quickly identify dangerous content.

While all video marketers look forward to the day when controversial content is completely excluded without fail, we need a solution in the short term. The first step to help solve this problem is to make better use of the data that we have. The largest and most obvious source of data is our placement performance report. Unfortunately, this data only shows the title of the video. Determining intent from a video title is not always the easiest task, and going through each individual video on YouTube can quickly turn into a Sisyphean effort.

Here is where the YouTube Data API can help. Using the YouTube URL, we can extract the video ID and then use the API to pull all sorts of useful information. Instead of just a title, we can now get the description, as well as the number of likes, dislikes, and views. As Frederick Vallaeys found out when building his solution for this problem, Google provides some inconsistent outputs when trying to pull placement reports for video campaigns through the API. Instead, I put together a Google Sheets add-on that can be used to pull this data quickly into a spreadsheet.