Bug? Looker studio YouTube Analytics connector, Country Code excluding null or 'ZZ' = bad totals

[calvslooker]

Hiya @Emma_Docs @Roderick @Rick_E  @marout 

I'm using Google's pre-built YouTube analytics connector with Looker Studio, and I'm blending my YouTube source with a google sheet to add some extra meta data to videos (an internal category, list status), and filter to a set of specific video IDs within my channel.

As soon as I include the country code dimension from YT into my blend, it excludes a large amount of views from the data.

What I've arrived at is that unlike the full YouTube API , which returns viewers with an unknown country as the 'ZZ' country code, the Looker Studio connector just excludes these views completely. If I don't include the country code dimension in my blend I get the full view count, but as soon as I do it reduces.

I've even tried creating a calculated field using a WHEN case to say WHEN Country Code IS NULL THEN 'Unknown', ELSE 'Known', but when this is included in my blend it just returns 'Known'.

This looks to be a bug with the connector, but if I view the stats directly in YouTube Studio the same thing occurs - under the 'geography' section for a video, the total will be correct, then beneath it will be a list of country view counts that don't sum to the overall total, and there is no 'Unknown' or 'ZZ' row.

Any ideas on how I can get around this without paying for a third party connector? 

Thanks!
Cal

[calvslooker]

Hello, just bumping this - can anyone help please?

[calvslooker]

Hello, bumping this again - are you able to help @Emma_Docs @Roderick @Rick_E @marout ?

Thanks! Cal

[Rick_E]

Since you are seeing the same behavior in YouTube, it's possible that your data is being subjected to YouTube's data anonymization thresholds: 

https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/data_model#data-anonymization

[calvslooker]

Hey @Rick_E,

Thanks for the reply. This might be the case, but should views with 'unknown' location data not be reported in Looker with the 'ZZ' country code as per the API spec?

The bigger issue for me is that as soon as Country Code is in my blend, even if I am not using the geo dimension in a chart the count is significantly reduced, e.g. I have a scorecard of overall views, but can never see the true 'total views' figure as in the example below. Is there any way around this? 

For example, suppose a channel owner retrieves two reports. The first report lists total views for a particular video, and the second report lists total views for that video on a country-by-country basis. During the specified time period, assume that the video was viewed 1000 times, where 500 views occurred in the United States, 498 occurred in Canada, and two occurred in France.

In this example, the first report would indicate that the video was viewed 1000 times. The second report would indicate only that the video was viewed 500 times in the United States and 498 times in Canada. As such, there would be a difference between the total view counts in the two reports. Note that the second report would not contain any indication that two other views had also occurred (or that any views had occurred in France).

This behaviour only occurs when I'm blending. If I just have the YT analytics data source unblended, my scorecard figure shows the true 'total views' across the channel, and only charts that include a country code metric would report a reduced number because of anonymisation (like in the example below) and/or 'ZZ'/'Unknown' location views being filtered out.

I need the blend to report on a specific set of videos in my channel and add some extra metadata like whether each video is listed / unlisted. 

Many thanks!

Cal