- Today we're talking YouTube thumbnail performance
and how you can easily boost your YouTube ranking,
including how to access advanced
click-through rate data for all your videos
and translate that into getting more views on YouTube.
(mid-tempo music)
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you leverage video
to amplify your business and brand.
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make sure you click that subscribe button,
and all the links
to everything we mention in this video
you can find linked in the description box below.
Let's jump into it.
Whether you realize this or not,
your YouTube thumbnails are a critical element
of YouTube ranking and video optimization.
Every time your video is shown in search results
or in a viewer's suggested feed,
YouTube is tracking that as an impression.
Every time a video gets clicked,
that's tracked as a click.
The ratio of total clicks that your video gets
versus the total number of times
that your video is shown
is called your click-through rate.
It's a great indicator that YouTube can easily use
to compare your videos to all the other ones
that are displaying alongside it.
Why is this important?
Really quickly, if your video has
a low click-through rate relative to other videos
that are shown alongside it,
then YouTube is likely to rank it lower
in the feed or in the search results
so that it can better highlight the content
that viewers are clearly more attracted to.
Thumbnails are a big factor in grabbing that attention
and determining whether it's your video
that gets clicked.
In this video, I'll be showing you
how you can easily access
advanced click-through rate data
for all your videos so that you can see
what's working, what's not, and improve it fast.
Stick around to the end
because I'll also share with you
a free resource that can easily 10X your results
with keyword research and YouTube SEO.
To access this data, you will wanna make sure
you're using the new Studio Beta.
If you're seeing the old dashboard,
click on the new one here
and then you wanna go over to Analytics.
Then you just come up at the top here
to Reach Viewers.
On this page, down in this chart
is the one that we're talking about.
You can see here our number of impressions.
Then right below that is a click-through rate of 5.7%.
Our videos in the last 28 days
have had 12.2 million impressions
with 702.5 thousand views,
which gives us that click-through rate of 5.7%.
With this number, 5.7%, I do wanna stress that
to not be comparing this number to anyone else.
This really is individual to your channel.
But no matter what this number is,
it should be your goal
to improve that conversion rate,
so improve that ratio from people seeing your content
to people clicking on it.
But there really is no point where it's like,
that's an awesome click-through rate
and that's a really poor click-through rate
because there's so many variables
that come into play with this.
If I come back up here to Overview
and then come down here to Top videos,
let's hit See More.
This is gonna bring up all the analytics
and data from our top videos here.
Again, we're just showing
last 28 days at this point
and we're specifically looking at watch time here.
These fields here are customizable,
so if you're not seeing
Impressions click-through rate,
then you can hit plus, then go to Reach,
down to Impressions click-through rate,
and that'll bring up this column here.
If we click on the title,
then that's gonna sort them by click-through rate.
You can see the top one here is our average,
the 5.7 that we saw.
We've got a few videos here that have a 10
or over 10% click-through rate,
and some of the other ones down at the bottom here
are down around six.
This page here is only showing our top 50 results,
so the top 50 results in regards to the videos
with the most-watched time on our channel.
If you do wanna show more than the top 50,
if you wanna show this data,
this click-through rate impression data
for all of the videos on your channel,
then here is an advanced way to do it.
If we go back up to this arrow at the top corner here,
it's gonna give us the ability to download
either a Google sheet or into a CSV,
like an Excel file.
We're gonna pick CSV here,
save it on our desktop,
and now when we open that up in Excel,
we'll just spread out some of these columns here,
we've got our video title,
we've got our watch time,
we've got our views, average view duration,
video thumbnail impressions,
and video thumbnail impressions click-through rate.
This is the one that we are talking about.
If we scroll down here,
you can see that we're going much more than 50.
Currently on our channel, we have 256 videos.
Might be a couple here that are unlisted,
but for all of them,
you can see the click-through rate,
the click-through data, showing here in Excel.
The next step then is to look
at your highest-performing videos,
or the ones with the highest-performing
click-through rates, and then you wanna look
for any commonalities or similarities
with these top-converting thumbnails,
the ones with the highest click-through rate,
because these are the ones that are working for you
and are your standouts on your channel.
Look at those thumbnails.
What did they look like?
Did most of them have a lot of text or no text?
Did they have your picture on them?
What were the colors like?
Were they really bright
or were they more of a dull thumbnail?
Whatever it is that's common amongst your top ones,
you'll then wanna start implementing that
on some of your older thumbnails as well,
or at least for your newer thumbnails going forward.
Then you can go back through
and try and update some of your older thumbnails
that maybe have a much lower click-through rate
and see how that works.
If you do try this, what I would suggest
is that after applying the new thumbnail
that you give it at least a month to see how it goes
and then measure to see if it's an improvement or not.
But anything under that
is not gonna be enough time.
You could also try something totally different,
a brand-new design or theme for your thumbnails
and see how they go.
Again, this is all data-driven.
You're able to make good decisions
based on this data here that YouTube is providing.
Your goal now becomes
to increase that click-through rate.
If you're interested in AB testing
or split testing your thumbnails,
putting up two versions and seeing which one
is going to get more clicks,
then TubeBuddy has an awesome feature
that will let you do this.
Pretty much how it works is that you'll assign
two different thumbnail images to the one video
and TubeBuddy then will automate the rest
and it will serve half of those impressions,
or half of the times that your thumbnail
is loaded to one thumbnail and half to the other.
After the set period of time,
it's gonna tell you which one was the winner,
which one of those had the highest amount
of clicks per impression.
This feature is absolutely amazing,
but it is only available on their legend planned,
which is one of their higher ones,
but it's definitely an awesome tool to have.
Now that you've got a solid understanding
of how important your thumbnail images actually are
and how to go in and interpret
your click-through rate data,
we have put together a free resource
to help you out with your keyword research.
This is a fast-track checklist that'll step you through
the key YouTube ranking factors
to help you 10X your results
and how to get the most out of your YouTube SEO
and keyword research.
To grab a copy, click the link onscreen now
and I'll see you soon.