Still collecting OR No data

When you see this message (“Still Collecting or No Data”), here is what it might mean and what you need to do next:

  • If you have not used Netlytic for a long period of time (e.g., one month or longer), it is likely that your Twitter access token has expired. Please go to your My Account page, and unlike and then link back your Twitter account to Netlytic. After that, recreate your dataset to make it run again.   
  • If you recently submitted your data collection request, (within the last hour), it means that your data collection request is in the queue and is “Still Collecting”. Most of the new requests are usually processed within 15-20 minutes; however, sometimes it can take longer depending on how many other requests are in the queue. Check again in an hour or two.
  • If it has been over a couple of hours or more since you submitted your data collection request, it means that Netlytic executed your search query, but there was No Data The “No Data” message may be caused by one or more of the following reasons:
  1. Your search query didn’t return any records
    • This might be caused by a typo or special characters in the search query;
    • Troubleshooting: Correct any typos, and remove any special characters that may “break” a query. Also try running the same search query using the built-in search function available on the social media site to see if it returns any results. Once you are satisfied with the query, copy and paste it into Netlytic and rerun the collection.
    • Note: Please keep in mind that some social media sites do not return historical data via their free public API (a protocol that Netlytic uses to collect data automatically.) Twitter, for example, does not return results older than 7 days via the free public API; as a result, even if your query via Twitter search function produces some results, it may return 0 records in Netlytic if the most recent tweet that corresponds to your search is older than 7 days. If this is the case, you can either wait a few days and see if any new tweets matching your search criteria will become available or you can scrap the original search query and come up with a new search query on a different but related topic.
  2. You’ve exceeded the API rate limit
    • Your Netlytic account might have reached the social media site’s API rate limit. (This is a pre-defined threshold of the maximum number of requests that a 3rd party tool such as Netlytic can submit to a social media site on your behalf.) This situation often arises when a user tries to collect too many live datasets concurrently from the same social media site.
    • Each social media site sets their own search rate limits, it is not possible to determine in advance the exact number of concurrent live datasets you can have at any one time. (For example, Twitter’s limit is 180 requests per 15 minutes.)
    • Troubleshooting: reduce the number of datasets that are collecting data to 10 or less, and wait to see if Netlytic is able to retrieve new records during the next data collection cycle (Twitter – every 15 min).
  3. There is an unsupported syntax in your collection request/query:
    • Troubleshooting: In Netlytic, click on the “Edit” dataset and confirm that your search request is in accordance with the Netlytic’s instructions.
      1. YouTube Video Comments: Do not enter the full URL, only enter the ID of the video, found after the “watch?v=” at the end of the URL. For example, if the full URL of a YouTube video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1V2V3 then you need to only enter “V1V2V3” (no quotes) as your collection request.
      2. Twitter supports a number of search operators such as “OR” and “-”. Check that you are using the right operators. Netlytic does not support Twitter’s time filters (“since” and “until”).