We are very excited to announce our latest built in data connector! As of today, you will now be able to use the YouTube Video Connector to pull in YouTube videos from your YouTube channel into your Knowledge Graph!
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Install the YouTube Video Connector into your account in one of two ways: Head over to the “Apps” tab on your account, click “Directory” or head to the Connectors tab in your account.
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Click on “YouTube Video Connector”
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When you install it, you will be prompted to fill in the channel ID of the YouTube channel you want to pull in videos from. You can find your channel ID by following these steps.
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After you’ve completed the installation flow, the connector will run automatically!
Looking for your Channel ID? If the above steps in the YouTube help article don’t work for you to find the Channel ID, you can find it in another way! Here’s some steps:
- Go to your YouTube Channel on YouTube.
- Click the “About” section.
- Right click anywhere on the page and choose “View Page Source.”
- Ctrl+f for “channelId” and the ID of the YouTube channel is the value next to that field.
Have any questions? Let us know!
3 Likes
Hi - thanks, this is really helpful! I’ve been able to successfully add videos from YouTube into the Knowledge Graph, but am noticing that many of the video description fields are cut short, with ellipses at the end in Yext (although YouTube has a complete description). Do you know what could be causing this / how I can correct the upload?
Hi Curtis,
So great to hear that you are using the connector! Unfortunately, the truncated description is what comes back in the YouTube API response. You can check this by clicking on “View Raw Response” button on the connector page and looking at the value of the description field for each of the videos. Here’s what I see when I look at that on my connector.
As we continue to evolve our Connector library and continue to add feature updates to the YouTube connector we can see if there’s another way to pull in the full description for each video.
Let us know if you have any other questions or suggestions for updates to the connector!
Thank you!
Dana
So I’ve successfully connected the YouTube Channel for one of my clients into the Knowledge Graph but how do I assign their videos to their actual listing? Looks like the interface when I edit their knowledge graph only allows to paste in a YouTube URL etc. I don’t see how you assign the videos to a client once connected???
Hi Kenny,
The YouTube connector creates new video entities. This is primarily used for Answers - you can include video entities in your site search for example.
From a Listings perspective, you’ll need to add the YouTube links to the built-in Videos field on your Location entities (as you saw) for the videos to push to the location Listings. Side note - the Hitchhikers vertical search for Publishers includes a facet for fields, in case you’re interested in which publishers accept videos.
One suggestion for matching videos to locations - If the videos contain some kind of data that can be used to identify the location they’re connected to, let’s say you have a Geomodifier or Store ID in the video name, you can use some Excel data manipulation and a VLOOKUP to pull in the video URL based on that field.
Hey! I had a few follow-up questions from this thread that I was hoping the team could answer for me:
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Has there been any progress made on pulling the full description from the YouTube Video? I saw that Dana mentioned we currently get the partial description from the API response but was curious if there was a fix yet.
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Is there a way to migrate any tags added to videos from YouTube into the Knowledge Graph? My client was hoping to have the tags be used as a searchable field in Answers
Thanks,
Cubby
Hey Cubby!
Pulling in both tags and full descriptions, along with all the data included in the pre-built Youtube App & Native Source, can be accomplished by building a connector using a function as a source instead!
In this video, I provide an end-to-end walkthrough of how to copy my youtube function, apply it to your Yext account, and create a connector using it as the source! The video should cover all of the details, but let me know if you still have questions after watching.
Note - in the video linked above, I’m relying on the Yext CLI so you’ll have to install that by following the instructions here.
Best,
DJ
Hi DJ/team -
The github link to the youtube function no longer works - https://github.com/YextSolutions/Functions-as-a-Source
Is there a new link or solution I can use to get full descriptions from the Youtube connector?
Thanks,
Ethan
Hi Ethan!
Sorry about that - here’s an updated link.
You can follow the same video instructions DJ outlined in the previous post to add it to your account. Let us know if you have any other questions!
Thank you!
Dana
Hi, I’d like to set up the YouTube connector in my Answers experience but I don’t want all the videos from my channel to appear in Yext. Is is possible to select which videos should be pulled in?
Cheers,
Amy
Hi Amy,
Could you send over the business ID for the account you are working? It should be the string of digits at the end of this URL: https://www.yext.com/s/XXXXXXX.
Do you have a youtube connector set up already? If so, it would be easier for the team to play around with connector settings to see if we can get your desired result. Otherwise, we need your Youtube Channel ID and Google Linked Account ID.
If you could provide any other details like the category, playlist, or type of videos you are looking to exclusively pull in that would be helpful!
Best,
Micaela
Hi @Micaela_Luders, I just spotted your reply now. Yes, we have the Youtube connector set up. Our business ID is 3763506. Let me know the best way to share the playlist IDs with you.
I have added snippet.playlistId as a selector but the connector doesn’t seem to be pulling in that information.
Best wishes,
Amy
Hi @Amy_Nolan,
One possible set up is to pull all Youtube videos into your Yext account and then use saved filters to specify which playlists or videos will be indexed in your Search experience. Would this work for your use case? If so, we can help you set this up. You’ll need a separate connector function to pull in the playlist name to your entities.
If this setup would not work for your case, can you tell us more about what you’re trying to do? Do you want to pull in one playlist or a few? Or are you looking to choose videos not based on playlist?
Best,
Kristy
Hi @Kristy_Huang ,
I want to pull in one playlist, which has 135 videos in it. (My entire channel has over 600 videos, I’d rather not pull everything into Yext as it would create a lot of entities).
Best wishes,
Amy
Hi @Amy_Nolan,
In that case, I’d actually advice against using our YouTube source, but rather creating a custom “Pull from API” connector. If you use YouTube’s playlist endpoint (https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/playlistItems), you should be able to include a query parameter where you specify the id of the playlist from which you’d like to fetch videos. Don’t forget to include another query parameter with key: part and value: snippet. For pagination, copy the inputs in the screenshot below.
Best,
Matt
