- Got a great question from the Supreme Gecko,
who asked for a checklist of all the technical things
you should be doing on your videos to make sure
that you're getting the most traffic as possible.
And today we're gonna go through that checklist
so that you guys are winning, growing,
reaching more people, changing their lives,
and all the good stuff you're trying to accomplish
on YouTube.
(electronics whirring)
Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer.
Welcome to Video Creators,
where we are all about helping you guys
grow your YouTube audience,
make more money, get more views, more subscribers,
all for the sake of reaching them and changing their lives
with the message that you're spreading.
And here we talk a lot about the human elements
that really grow a YouTube channel,
because all of YouTube's search and discovery systems
and the algorithms are designed
to surface content that people want to see,
and so everything they're measuring are viewer signals,
like watch time and session time and things like that.
But does that mean that all the technical things we do
to grow our channel no longer matters?
Ultimately, what YouTube wants for us as creators
is not to have to learn a whole bunch of technical stuff.
It's really just make really good content,
publish it on our platform, and then we will put it
in front of the right people at the right time.
That is the goal of the algorithm,
to surface the right video
to the right person at the right time.
And YouTube does that by really focusing in
on the signals that they are getting
from each viewer on YouTube.
That's how they make a lot of those decisions.
And my list of technical things
you should evaluate on your channel,
or to grow it and get more traffic,
starts with analyzing (pinging)
your top performing videos on your channel.
And I want you to look for trends
that all of them have in common.
Sometimes you'll find that all the thumbnails
either have text or don't have text,
or all the titles are written a certain way,
or maybe there's a certain topic or subject
that they all have in common or something.
I want you to look at that and then figure out,
what can I do to reproduce the success of my top videos,
do that again in some new videos that I'm going to create.
One idea might be to make new videos
that are follow-ups to your older ones
that are performing really well.
And then, once you've made those new videos
and published them, go back to your older videos
and update the end screens to point to your follow-up video,
so that people are more likely to watch the popular video
and then hopefully keep watching on your newer content
that's like, next step, part two, follow-up,
to be continued type of thing.
Unless, of course,
those top videos already have a very high click-through rate
on your end screen,
then I wouldn't touch it.
Number two is analyze (pinging)
the audience retention graphs on your video.
If you've been a creator for any period of time,
you've likely heard people talk about this.
And then when I ask creators if they're actually doing it,
most of them say, no.
And it makes sense,
it's the boring, non-sexy part of YouTube
that no one really likes to get into.
But there is such valuable information
in your audience retention graphs.
I have friends who have multi-million subscriber channels,
who know exactly how many seconds they can talk for
before people leave their content,
how many seconds their wife can talk before people leave,
how many seconds they can go
without showing one of their kids
before people will leave.
That is how detailed you can get
by watching these patterns over the years
in your audience retention graphs,
and seeing what holds someone's attention
and what causes them to leave.
For example, I know for you guys,
it holds your attention way better
if I open these videos with some motion,
some really highly-edited, quick-pace cuts.
When you click play
and you see a lot of action happening really quickly,
our audience retention graphs do not decline nearly
as rapidly as they do if I were to start the video
just sitting down and talking like this right off the bat.
Now that's not to say that your audience
will respond the same way,
I've worked with over a thousand YouTube creators,
I've looked at I don't even know how many tens of thousands
of audience retention graphs,
and I know that they are very different
from creator to creator, niche to niche,
industry to industry, audience to audience,
it varies significantly.
So the thing here is not really, well, what's normal,
what's best, what's average, what's good or bad,
it's look at your own graphs,
how are you currently performing,
and how can you do better,
because ultimately if you wanna grow your YouTube channel,
it comes down to how do people interact
and engage with your content.
And you can look for the patterns
that will help you be able to reduce the friction,
so that they watch longer and get to the end of your videos.
And that comes to number three,
the third technical thing that you should be analyzing
in your content for almost every video
are the end screen (pinging)
click-through rates.
Because once you have gotten your audience retention graph
to a point where maybe half the people
who click play are still watching when the video ends,
now we wanna see what do we do design-wise
to set up this end screen
so that we have the highest percentage
of people getting to the end of my videos,
and then clicking and watching more content.
And then those people watch that video,
get to the end, click and watch more,
and you're just getting,
at this point, massive watch time
across all of your videos on YouTube.
Your whole channel just gets a tremendous lift.
I've done several videos in the past
about how to optimize your end screens
for more clicks and retention and all that,
so you'll find links to those down below,
or interactive cards are on here you can click on.
But the really quick summary is that you need
to eliminate any language that the video is over.
Do not give your viewers permission to leave.
Those end screens need to come on screen
while you are still delivering content,
and then you'll only have a few seconds at the end
to give them a pitch
for the next video you want them to watch,
and you're going to point to that space,
give it a pitch, and then just talk with the assumption
that they're going to keep going.
And click-through rates will go from like 0.7, 1% on average
to, as a normal click-through rate on end screens,
up to like 30, some of our clients do 40,
over 40% click-through rates on their end screens
when they start doing that.
The fourth technical thing
to evaluate doesn't sound technical at first,
but hang with me for a second.
I want you to do
tons of experiments (pinging)
on your YouTube channel this year.
I don't want you to just get into this rut
of doing the same thing over and over again
and not seeing the traction that you want,
but just thinking, well, if I just be consistent,
and keep trying, eventually it's gonna pay off, right,
I hope, and no is the answer.
I have friends who have gone years trying
to do the same thing over and over,
waiting for their big breakout moment that never came.
What I want for you to do this year is to focus
on different ideas you can adapt to
that will improve your content
and make it easier for people to click
and watch and consume more of your videos.
And it really comes down to
how you craft your actual video content itself.
Where this gets technical is I don't want you
to just haphazardly just change a lot of things.
I want you to think, okay, if I tried this one thing,
I think that would move the needle on the watch time
that I'm getting on my videos.
And so I just want you to try that one thing
for maybe five to eight videos,
and then in your analytics I want you to create a group
of those five to eight videos
where you're doing that one thing differently.
And then I want you to make another group
that's a control group of your older content,
and then you're gonna use the Compare To feature
in your analytics
to compare group A to group B,
where you can see, does this one thing that I'm changing,
does it actually lead to more watch time,
or more subscribers, or more views,
or more whatever the metric is
that you're trying to really dial in
and change there and influence.
And you can use that feature
to A B test almost anything you want.
Like thumbnails that have text on them,
versus thumbnails that don't have text.
Thumbnails that have a face on them
versus two faces or no faces,
or titles that ask a question
versus titles that make a statement.
Or videos that open without an opening hook
and get right into the content,
versus videos that do open with an opening hook.
There's a lot of different things, experiments you can do,
and I want you to not just haphazardly make those choices
but I want you to track and measure them
so you know what is actually working for your content,
your videos and your audience.
The fifth technical thing
that I think you should really start focusing on
are using playlists (pinging)
more intentionally.
They are a very powerful tool.
Most creators use them wrong.
Most creators think that playlists are just a way
of organizing content.
But they're not, I want you to think of playlists primarily
as a way of getting people to watch one video,
and then another video, and then another video,
and another video,
that's what playlists are actually used best for.
And so I want your channel to have tons of them.
And I want them to be all super focused,
not really long, bolted with like 57 videos,
but a consumable amount, like four, six, eight videos,
where someone can see,
oh, yeah, six videos, I got time for that.
You should be giving each of those playlists
really enticing titles,
and giving them a good thumbnail,
and just putting your best couple videos in that playlist,
and not the entire, every video you have
that could possibly be (electronic music)
about that topic.
And then when you get to the end of your video,
I want you to pitch that playlist
for people to get into them,
like this one here, if you really wanna dive in
to more depth about data that you should be tracking,
and how to use your analytics
in order to find opportunities for growth,
click that playlist, get in there,
we're gonna have a great time,
and I'll see you guys over in that next video.