Can I find the impressions of my YouTube channel using YouTube Analytics API

Question

I'm using the YouTube Analytics API to report information on my YouTube channel. I can't seem to find a metric to find the total impressions my channel had (which can be found manually in YouTube Studio). Does YouTube offer it or is there a work around to find the data anyway?

Answer 1

As always YouTube APIs doesn't provide access to a basic feature but here is a workaround:

Go on your Channel analytics Content interface in YouTube Studio.

Now select the time frame, pay attention to select one of following:

• Last 7 days
• Last 28 days
• Last 90 days
• Last 365 days
• Since uploaded (lifetime)

Because other options depending on the channel creation date are maybe unavailable.

Open the Web Developer Tools Network tab of your web-browser (by using Ctrl + Shift + E on Firefox for instance).

Reload the webpage using for instance F5.

You should see a request to get_screen, copy it as cURL (by right-clicking).

Pay attention to remove -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br' from it in order to get the JSON response in a human readable format. Otherwise you would face the following warning:

Warning: Binary output can mess up your terminal. Use "--output -" to tell curl to output it to your terminal anyway, or consider "--output " to save to a file.

Execute the cURL request and your channel Impressions value is in the JSON response at the key /cards/3/funnelCardData/totalData/metricColumns/0/counts/values[0].

Note that I don't know for how long the cURL request will still work.