How To Track YouTube Videos, Channels Using Google Spreadsheet

Most often we are eager to know how our favorite YouTube videos/channels are doing in terms of number of subscribers, views, likes, comments, and dislikes. Maybe you need more detailed statistical data of a YouTube video or channel and its videos.

Don't worry YouTube Videos & Channels Analytics Tracker spreadsheets add-on can save your day. All you need is video & channel ids of your favorite videos and channels. You will see all analytical data of the videos/channels added in a spreadsheet.

The no of likes, dislikes, comments, publish date, duration will be exported to the spreadsheet for every video you add to the sheet. You can also know the no of views, subscribers, videos for the channels. In addition to that, you can export all the videos uploaded by a particular channel to a separate sheet which will contain above-mentioned statistics data of those videos.

How to use

On YT Tracker add-ons page, select INSTALL. A pop-up will ask for your permission. Authorize it. Now in your spreadsheets under add-ons, you'll see the add-on menu. You'll get two options Track YouTube Videos & Track YouTube Channels.

Both will open a new spreadsheet. That spreadsheet gets video/channel ids as input in the first column and fetches relevant data from YouTube APIs. When you add ids in the first column within seconds, statistical data will be updated in the other columns.

Simply delete the row if you don't want to track something.

How to get YouTube video ID/channel ID

This is simple you just got to extract some part of the URL from address bar. For example,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwppdrjsBPAZg5_cUwQjfMQ

Marked part of the URL is video/channel ID. Sometimes it'll be trickier to get the channel id from URLs like https://www.youtube.com/taylorswift. I have made the bookmarklet below to findout the channel IDs of such channel URLs.

Drag the below button to your bookmarks bar. From the channel pages with such URLs, refresh the page once by pressing (Ctrl (or Cmd) + R) as YouTube is a single page app, you might have reached the channel page from other page and then click the bookmarklet, it will show you the channel ID.

Channel ID finder

Also see: Fetch retention, user geography, revenue metrics etc., of your YouTube channel.

Features of YouTube Videos & Channels Tracker:

You can get add-on menu under Extensions → YT Tracker

1. Export videos uploaded by any channel

Highlight the column of the channel on YouTube channels sheet and choose the option Fetch Channel Videos from add-on menu. Within seconds, A new sheet will open with all the videos of that channel. A sheet with Charlie Puth channel videos,

By default, first 50 videos of the channel will be exported. However, you can increase the count by selecting Configuration from the add-on menu.

2. Auto refresh on open with an option to disable

Counts refresh automatically when you open the spreadsheet. It has the same 6hrs cache rule as Google Drive Direct link generator add-on. You can toggle this feature by selecting Configuration under add-on menu.

3. Refresh data on demand

You can refresh the data on sheet whenever you want by clicking on Refresh in the add-on menu.

4. Choose what to display

For instance, thumbnails take up considerable height in a row, so if you feel like viewing maximum no of rows on the sheet, you can do it by deselecting thumbnail from Choose display fields add-on menu. Likewise, you can control what data is exported in the sheet using the same add-on menu.

5. Ability to abbreviate counts

If you want to see counts as abbreviated text, you can do so by toggling Abbreviate counts option from Configuration add-on menu.

You can also check the privacy policy of YT Tracker.

Feature requests and issues

Feel free to reach out to me either by mail or by a comment on this post.