- See there's two ways that you can optimize
your videos for more views, more subscribers,
and more watch time, and more growth overall.
Number one is you can do what a lot of creators do
and that's just keep trying the same thing
over and over and over again, and hope that
the next video somehow performs differently
than the pervious one did.
The second, and much smarter way, is to take advantage
of all the information and data that YouTube gives you
about your videos and how they're performing,
and use that information to better learn
how to optimize and improve your very next video.
I know that there's a lot of different metrics
and stats and analytics to look at, but there's
actually two that can tremendously help
when it comes to getting people to click
and watch your videos in the first place.
They are number one, impressions.
Which is how many times your thumbnails are shown
to a potential viewer.
Number two, the click-through rate.
Which is how often does a viewer click on
your thumbnail to watch your video.
When your videos surface to them.
Now Tom is one of the YouTube employees
over on the Creator Insider channel,
and he's been talking a lot about this for the
past year or so.
Tom was gracious enough to shoot a little video
for you guys, here's a collab, about some
really powerful ways you can use the insides
from your impressions and click-through rates
inside YouTube creator studio, and really optimize
your videos for more views, here's Tom.
(energetic electronic music)
- I think there's a few things you can do.
The easiest thing is to look at the lowest performing
click-through rates for your videos,
and consider updating the thumbnail and the headline.
Your thumbnail and headline is the first thing that
a viewer is going to use to decide
if they wanna click that play button.
Sometimes we actually see creators put so much time
into the video, and then the thumbnail
is kind of like a last minute thing.
But it actually can yield a lot of benefits,
if you just kind of make it a little bit more appealing.
One tip you can try, if you search for a topic
that's about a video that you did, you see what else
comes up in the search results.
You'll probably notice that those thumbnails
are pretty compelling.
They may describe what's in the video very well,
they may kind of convey the sense that
hey, you know, this creator really put a lot of time
in this video.
They're attractive, aesthetically pleasing.
Maybe there's additional information
in the thumbnail itself.
So those are things that you could do
using the CTR to say, okay of all of my videos
which ones have the lowest CTR and maybe I can
go back in and maybe upgrade those thumbnails
and then also look at the title.
Sometimes you see titles which are really kind of
generic and not really representative of
what's so interesting about the video.
So like what's the hook?
What's truly the headline?
Another thing I would share about click-through rates
is you really wanna be careful not to look at
that metric in isolation.
I would recommend looking at both the click-through rate
and your average view duration because if you have
very high click-through rate, but then when people
get to video they don't watch it or watch much of it.
That suggests that well maybe that thumbnail
didn't really represent what was in that video.
So it's a balancing act, you want to put your
best case forward to give your video a chance
but you also don't wanna over promise and then
result in a short view.
If your last upload is really having a lower
than normal CTR then you probably wanna consider
upgrading that thumbnail and tweaking the headline as well.
The last nuance I'll share is that if you have high CTR,
click-through rate, and high view duration
there is a limit, it's not like you'll get unlimited
potential because it's limited generally by
the size of the audience that's interested in that topic.
So as an example, I might have a video adding subtitles
in French.
I might have a really compelling thumbnail that
makes it really interesting and captures what's unique
about optimizing for the French market
and growing your French audience reach
and then the video may have long duration
because I put a lot of time in making the video.
At some point there's just so many people on YouTube
that are interested in optimizing
their YouTube channel for French audiences.
It reaches its sort of natural plateau,
but I think a lot of channels don't get to that plateau.
Either the thumbnail's not appealing or isn't doing
an accurate job selling the video.
The title is suboptimal, or of course the video
itself doesn't perform and then
it gets poor average view duration.
- Titles and thumbnails will definitely make
a really big impact on how well your videos perform.
So I would encourage you to do a few searches
on Google about how to write enticing
and engaging headlines.
There's a lot of research in phycology around that
that other industries use such as magazines, blogs,
podcasts, and a lot of other like newspapers
and a lot of other industries.
So you can learn a lot about that
that applies directly to YouTube.
Also I'd encourage you to watch a few
graphic design videos on YouTube
and just learn how to better craft images
that attracts the eye and entices people
to want to click as well.
I actually put together a short playlist for you guys
of some other creators who have million of subscribers
what they're doing to get people to click
and watch their videos.
You can click right there to jump into that playlist
but before you do that make sure
you click right down there to go visit the
Creator Insider channel.
Tom and other YouTube employees over there
are regularly publishing videos every week to
help you guys stay on the inside scoop of what's
happening behind the scenes of YouTube
and what they're working on for you guys.
So subscribe over there and then dive
into this playlist right here
and I'll see you guys over in the next video