Overview
Following a major expansion of, and improvements to, our YouTube panel, YouTube data has become available as a separate Device within Pathmatics. Our new YouTube data is so different from the pre-2023 data that no amount of data smoothing or normalization would result in an acceptable time-series comparison.
All YouTube data prior to January 1, 2023, will remain under the Desktop and Mobile Video device formats. An event flag will be added to time-series charts in these devices to remind users that YouTube was moved to a different device on January 1, 2023.
YouTube TV data appears under the OTT Streaming Services (General) Publisher data. YouTube Premium is an ad-free offering.
What we capture
Regions
| Region | Data collection start date |
|---|---|
| 🇺🇸 United States | January 1, 2023 |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | January 1, 2023 |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | January 1, 2023 |
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | January 1, 2023 |
| 🇦🇺 Australia | January 1, 2023 |
| 🇳🇿 New Zealand | January 1, 2023 |
Collection before January 1, 2023 rolls up under Desktop Video and Mobile Video.
Devices and formats
- Video
Creative types
- Skippable in-stream ads
- Non-skippable in-stream ads
- Bumper ads which play before, during, or after other YouTube videos
More details can be found on the YouTube Help site.
Methodology
Collection method
Our YouTube data collection is comprised of desktop panels, mobile panels, and data aggregators.
Our opt-in YouTube panels allow us to track ads served to real YouTube users across Mobile, Desktop, and CTV devices.
- Each Mobile panelist organically discovers and actively opts in to share data about the ads served to them on their YouTube app via free 1st party apps.
- Each Desktop panelist has installed a Chrome extension on their browser and each time an ad is shown to them while watching YouTube, we are given details about the ad.
- Each CTV panelist has a device next to their TVs which detects which Streaming Services panelists are using to watch OTT content and uses ACR (automatic content recognition) to detect when the panelist is served a YouTube ad.
We do not collect personally identifiable information (PII) from our panelists at any time.
Our YouTube panel brings a unique set of Mobile, Desktop, and CTV users to our growing global panel. In total, our global panel includes hundreds of thousands of active users across Desktop, Mobile, and CTV devices in North America, Europe, and Oceania who represent a diverse set of demographic and user characteristics.
Panelists represent a diverse set of demographic and user characteristics, enabling our panel to have the scale and coverage that represents the user population.
Impression, spend and CPM estimation
Our YouTube spend, impression, and CPM estimates are derived using Google’s publicly reported ad revenue, industry averages of CPMs, and proprietary heuristics. We apply our sampled data from the panels and estimated CPM rates to calculate impressions and spend per creative, brand and advertiser.