Over a billion users visit YouTube every month, and they all watch a billion hours of video per day . YouTube was the number one downloaded app on iOS in 2018, beating out Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat (according to Mashable ). YouTube is a powerful channel when it comes to advertising, and it’s not going anywhere.

So what does this mean for you as a marketer? YouTube was the number one AdStage integration users requested , an obvious sign that marketers are taking the audience and opportunities on video platform seriously. As marketers become more comfortable with the platform, the need for sophisticated data analysis will also grow.

So we listened and we started building. Now your ability to analyze YouTube campaigns is faster, deeper, and more detailed.

Cross-Channel Analysis

As most marketers know, it takes a lot of touch-points to turn a prospect into a customer. So your ad strategy likely contains multiple channels. For example, Google is great to connect with customers who are looking for a product/solution like yours, And you might choose Instagram for building your brand, while Twitter might be a way to engage with your customer. With so many people watching video, YouTube advertising is becoming a channel worth exploring for a broad range of businesses. But how do you optimize your ads on YouTube and how much do you spend on them vs. another ad network like LinkedIn?

Another important factor to keep in mind while considering how to allocate your spend, is analysis that takes into account time and seasonality. In order to do that, you need to be able to store and access historical data. Otherwise, you run the risk of making decisions based on a shorter time frame than you should.

If you’ve used AdStage to manage your Facebook campaigns, you know the level of robust metrics we can deliver. Recently, AdStage undertook a massive project to update our capabilities to match what’s available on each platform. That included new releases and any other enhancements made available through open APIs.

When analyzing cross-channel metrics, it important to normalize data so you can more accurately compare performance across the various ad networks. Couple this with historical data and you have access a powerful amount of data. In addition, AdStage can leverage metadata (data that provides information about other data). In our case, that’s headlines, URLs, images, and more. That extra data allows us to go super deep on campaign results and let customers create reports they won’t have access to anywhere else. Like the ability to easily pull all of your creative, including videos, and report on them side-by-side with selected ad-level metrics.

How to Access All YouTube Metrics

After connecting your AdWords account into AdStage, you can find your YouTube data in AdStage Report. Your data can be visualized in our cross-network widget.

Here you can view your YouTube performance data in various widgets, from the Account to ads (video) levels.

Once you have your dashboards for YouTube set up, you can use them for:

1. Cross-Network Comparisons — Include/compare your Youtube data against other networks or similar ad types.
2. Analyzing Youtube Performance — From the account to the video level, get high level or granular in analyzing your overall performance.

Automatically pull creative for reports

It’s one thing to have ad-level metrics in front of you, but you want to know which ads those numbers correspond to. Enter hours of screenshotting creative on the platform, adding it to a spreadsheet, and trying to organize everything into some semblance of sense. Not any more. AdStage’s Ad Creative widget is a cross-network widget that shows actual ad visuals just as they appear to your audience in the native network, along with selected ad-level metrics. You can choose specific ads to display or let Report determine the ads based on specific criteria like “Top 2 ads based on Conversion Rate.”

How to add the Ad Creative widget to your dashboard

Adding the Ad Creative widget to your dashboard is easy with the following steps. If you’re not already using AdStage to manage and optimize your paid media campaigns, join our 14-day free trial . Read more about AdStage Report and how it can help you measure performance faster with real-time data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Yahoo Gemini, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot.

1. Log in to your AdStage account
2. Click the Ad Creative widget on the Side pane to open the edit widget menu
3. Title your widget
4. Select the entities you want to include
1. Choose a level of granularity from the “Select Ads From the Following” dropdown
2. Choose the specific networks, accounts, campaigns, etc. from which you want to view ads. Note: You can display up to 6 ads per widget.
5. Choose the KPI(s) you want to include from the "Fields" section
6. Select a date range
7. Customize your data view with the following additional options below the date range selector:
1. Sort by a certain metric
2. Count: increase or decrease the number of ads in your table (up to 6)
3. Order your data
4. Filter by status (active, all, etc.)
5. Select a display style (visuals only, metrics, ad name, etc.)
6. Customize the width of your widget
8. Add filters on the next tab as needed

AdStage is the only place where you’ll find metadata-level metrics on your campaigns and ads. Use this advanced info to better analyze and optimize campaigns, and provide clients with even more value when maximizing their budgets and results.