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Impressions
Daniel Ch avatar
Written by Daniel Ch
Updated over a week ago

Basics:

This is how many times your video showed up on YouTube. In other words, how many times people saw this thumbnail/title show up on their screen on youtube.com.

learn:

Impressions are a good stat. The more the algorithm pushes the video, the more you'll see a spike in impressions.

When impressions begin to flatline, it's a good indicator that the algorithm is no longer pushing the video, and might be a good time to make a thumbnail/title change.

Many videos will get a large spike in impressions on the first few days after upload, as YouTube pushes your video out to your subscribers.

Gotchas:

Pay very close attention to impressions when you're A/B testing.

If one thumbnail got significantly more impressions than another, it's possible this is a much better thumbnail, as YouTube is pushing it more.

However, if that happened to be the thumbnail you showed first, it's possible that YouTube was just pushing the video more because it's new, and this data can be misleading.

Be sure to look at the dates/times shown for each thumbnail to help yourself understand the data better.

Also, any time someone sees your video outside of YouTube, it doesn't count towards impressions.

For example, if someone sees your video on twitter, and clicks on it, that's a view, but not an impression. So it is possible to have thousands of views and 10 impressions.

Advanced:

You can actually see impressions by source, which can be very useful.

We don't yet support this in app, but will have it hopefully in the next few months.

Until then, you can see this data in YouTube Studio's advanced page, in the "Traffic Source" tab.

Same as Views - most impressions on large videos will come from "Suggested Videos" and "Browse Features".

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