# Integrate YouTube with Databox

YouTube is a video hosting and sharing platform used by creators and businesses to publish, manage, and grow an audience through video content. It provides data on views, watch time, subscriber growth, engagement, and audience retention, but monitoring that data alongside marketing and business metrics requires constant context-switching. Connecting YouTube to Databox brings your channel analytics into your dashboards so you can track video performance, monitor audience trends, and report on growth alongside your other key metrics.

## Connection

### Before you begin

### Step 1: Sign in with Google

To connect YouTube to your Databox account for the [first time](/add-a-connection), a Google sign-in page will open. Enter the email or phone number associated with your Google account and follow the prompts to sign in.

If you've already established a connection, you can [reuse](/add-a-data-source) it to add new channels, as long as those channels are accessible with the existing connection's credentials.

google-sign-in-screen-for-youtube-databox-connection
### Step 2: Grant Databox access

After signing in, Google will ask you to review and confirm the permissions Databox needs. Review the requested permissions and click **Continue** to grant access.

google-oauth-permissions-screen-for-youtube-databox-connection
### Step 3: Select a YouTube channel

After granting access, select the YouTube channel you want to connect to Databox. Each channel must be added as a separate data source. You can only connect channels that you own.

## Considerations

Databox allows you to [create custom metrics with calculations](/create-a-custom-metric#with-calculations) by combining metrics from different sources into a formula. However, due to [YouTube's API Terms of Service](https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies-guide), which explicitly prohibit the creation of derived metrics from YouTube API data, YouTube metrics cannot be used as operands in custom metrics with calculations.

## ![lock](/assets/lock.2fb1bbc208afcc03d15a0a45f22bdf7f830322016e038e5721965851130807af.419bb737.svg) Datasets

The YouTube integration supports the creation of [datasets](/understanding-datasets), which allow you to structure and format your YouTube data for more flexible reporting in Databox. By organizing your data into a tabular format, datasets make it easier to filter, segment, and visualize key metrics across projects, clients, and team members.

The entity relationship diagram (ERD) below illustrates how data is organized within the YouTube integration, displaying the available **views** and **columns**, as well as the relationships between them (primary and foreign keys). This diagram represents the **schema**, or structure, of the data and helps you understand the underlying data model. With this context, you can create datasets using the relevant views and columns to build custom metrics tailored to your reporting needs.

## Resources

For comprehensive details on metrics, data availability, templates, specifications, usage guidelines, and other key information, refer to the resources listed below.

YouTube's API does not return data for reports created within the last 48 hours. As a result, the most recent 2–3 days of data may not yet be available in Databox. This is a YouTube API limitation and not specific to Databox.

 

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