Google+

Friday, March 27, 2015

Supermetrics: how to easily collect Analytics and YouTube data

Collecting and charting data from your YouTube and Google Analytics can be a time consuming process and not a very enjoyable one, as I’m sure you are aware of...But there’re some good news here. And it’s called Supermetrics.

What is Supermetrics? 

Supermetrics is a Google Drive add-on - an extension that you can add to your Google Sheets and Docs. Add-ons are similar to Google Apps Scripts but with some differences. If you’re curious to know more about this, go over this blog post here, where the two are compared in detail. And where you can also find a good overview of some useful Add-ons.


With Supermetrics you can create queries to (semi)automate your reporting from sources such as Google Analytics, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Google AdWords, etc….Data from these sources are added to a Spreadsheet (or Google Doc). You can then create live charts from these data, so they are automatically updated once you refresh your Supermetrics queries. Supermetrics comes with a free and pro versions.

The main two differences are about the amount of data you can get from each query and whether you can schedule automatic refresh of your queries, which is available only for the pro version (49 USD/month).

In CARIAA program M&E dashboard, we used the free version of Supermetrics.

How to activate and use Supermetrics?


To use this tool follow these simple steps below here:
  1. Activate Supermetrics - Navigate to the Add-ons button in your Google Sheets and browse the gallery to select Supermetrics.
  2. Set up your queries by 
    1. Connecting your data source and selecting your profiles - Launch the Supermetrics sidebar and connect the various sources you want to monitor. In our case, we only connected the Google Analytics and YouTube profiles that were shared with the Google Account we used.
    2. Selecting the date range you want to monitor and the metrics you are interested in - In our case, we set up queries for a specific time frame but you can also have a year-to-date query, last month, etc...Out of the many Google Analytics and YouTube metrics you can collect, we limited the query to web sessions, users and pageviews for Analytics, and views for YouTube.
  3. Launch your queries and see your data - Once you’re all set, decide how you want to get your data, in a table or in the various default charts. Data will be downloaded and added to your spreadsheet.
  4. Refresh your queries - From the Supermetrics menu under your Add-ons tab, you can refresh all your queries with a click and update your results and charts.
  5. Launch Supermetrics from your Add-ons menu
  6. Modify and edit your queries - Alternatively, you can click on Manage queries; this will open a worksheet where all your queries are listed. From here you can manage and modify them, for example changing the date range of the query.

Using Supermetrics has proved to be a very effective and efficient way to collect usage stats and traffic data for multiple Analytics profiles and YouTube channels at the same time, without having to waste time navigating in and out these various accounts to get individual data.

Note that, while at the beginning of this post I mentioned that this tool can also be used to collect data from Twitter, in our case we decided not to use Supermetrics for Twitter.

In the next post, I’ll explain you why we took this decision, and what we used instead. In the meantime, if you haven’t try it yet, give Supermetric a shot and see for yourself how it works.