7 Tips To Increase YOUR YouTube Views! Click-Through Rate
Today in this article we’re going to read about 7 Tips to Increase YOUR YouTube Views! Click-Through Rate.
Click-through rate is by far the most important metric you should be looking at daily weekly and a monthly basis on YouTube.
It’s the most important because everything else stems from getting that click on YouTube.
You want a good average view duration, you got to get the click first.
You want long session times, you got to get the click first.
You want engagement, comments, likes on your video, you got to get that click first.
And that’s why click-through rate is by far the most important thing.
So, what is the click-through rate?
Well, to put it simply, the click-through rate is the number of clicks or views your video gets divided by the number of impressions.
For example: –
If you get 10 clicks on a video that has 100 impressions, you have a 10% click-through rate.
Of course, with all things YouTube, it isn’t that simple.
As the volume of your impressions goes up, your click-through rate will go down most of the time.
This is because YouTube is expanding your audience and reaching less and less targeted viewers, and this is why we say the click-through rate is relative.
It’s relative to the number of impressions and the quality of impressions that your video is getting.
For example: –
I’d much rather have a video with a 1% click-through rate getting millions and millions of impressions versus a video with a 10% click-through rate just getting a few thousand.
The Click-through rate is also relative to your audience and your channel.
If your channel regularly gets a 5% click-through rate and you put out a video, and all other things being equal, gets a 7% click-through rate, you just increased your click-through rate by 40%. That is a massive jump.
Theoretically, that video should go on to get a ton of viewership, that is of course unless it’s the result of having way fewer impressions.
Remember, fewer impressions, very targeted audience, higher click-through rate.
It’s also important to note that certain areas of YouTube don’t report impressions.
That would be things like your end screens or the kid’s app, and then your videos are going to have very different click-through rates most of the time between browse and suggested.
Now if that’s getting confusing, it should be.
It’s an incredibly complex topic, and YouTube didn’t put this data out for over a decade, probably in part because it is confusing.
But here’s the good news. Increasing your click-through rate will almost always be a good thing.
So, this begs that question, how do we increase our click-through rate?
Well, there are a ton of ways to increase your click-through rate.
I’m going to give you my 7 Tips to Increase YOUR YouTube Views! Click-Through Rate.
1. Pick a focus for a niche.
Your audience has become a fan of you for one specific reason whether that’s your format, your personality, or the topics that you talk about.
Lean into whatever that is that drives the most viewership.
This will increase your click-through rate because as you make more videos on that specific thing, or focusing on that specific thing,
you’ll hit more and more of your core audience as opposed to hitting smaller sections of your audience even though that core audience is still going to be getting impressions that will bring down your click-through rate.
So if you just hit that core audience, you’re going to have a higher click-through rate video after video.
It is a bit indirect though; however, I got to say, it’s by far the number one tip I can give you to increase your click-through rate.
It’s that programming choice, it starts on the whiteboard before you even get the camera out.
2. A/B test your thumbnails.
Now, you can do this live just on YouTube after uploading your video at any point, right?
You just swap the thumbnail out; you measure the click-through rate before and after.
Now, we certainly recommend giving it at least seven days on either side so you have some sort of apples to apples comparison, but it’s not a true apple to apples test.
There’s a lot of factors going into that like which videos your videos are being suggested against.
TubeBuddy also has a really good tool for A/B testing and if you have the budget and can afford it, you can hire Little Monster to do the testing for you in advance via AdWords which is a much more controlled environment.
Not variable free, but much more controlled. And of course, this increase click-through rate because you have a thumbnail that has proven to give you a better click-through rate.
3.Use the colors yellow, red, and green.
Red and green hit the red and green cones in our eyes.
It’s very visually strong to us, it stands out, we see it.
And yellow is a combination of red and green light, which hits both cones and stands out to us.
I mean think about it, school buses are yellow, caution signs are yellow, wet floor signs that you see are yellow, and they’re yellow because they stand out to us.
4. Face or more in your thumbnail.
Rob Sandie from vidIQ presented some data that they found at VidCon Australia.
And what they found was that thumbnails that had two or three faces in them performed better.
Than thumbnails that had fewer or more faces in them.
And this makes a ton of sense biologically speaking because think about it when you walk into a room.
What do you do?
You look around to see if someone is looking at you or making eye contact, and you look for people’s faces because that communicates information to you.
And what I think is fascinating about it, is it’s built on our fight or flight mechanism.
If you walked up to a campfire back in the good old days and everyone was snarling at you or making angry faces you would probably say oh, for my safety I should leave.
If everyone is smiling, oh I’m probably welcome here to have some of our saber tooth tiger or whatever.
Number five piggybacks on number four, which shows the whites of the eyes or even better.
5.Make eye contact and show strong emotions on the face.
Yes, we look for faces, we want to see what the facial expressions are, is there any information there?
But we’re also looking to see If people are making eye contact with us. Are they looking at us?
Do they want our attention?
Showing a face with a strong emotion also draws the eye because it’s a way of communicating information.
We communicate far more information with our body language and facial expressions than we ever do with our words.
6.Creating an information gap.
And this has to do with your thumbnail and title combination.
An information gap is when a potential viewer has to ask themselves a question based on your thumbnail and your title.
For example: –
Oh my God, how did that happen?
Oh my God, who wins?
What happens next?
Oh, I want to see what that looks like.
I want to know how to make that.
A great example of that is if you are a baking channel and you show the finished project of an amazing cake you’ve made.
A viewer will go oh, I want to know how to make that.
The seventh tip for increasing your click-through rate is to…
7. make titles that are more like headlines.
So, think about newspapers or blog how they title their pieces is considered a headline.
You should think about the YouTube title in that same way and also in part because there’s no urgency to watch something that happened a while ago.
I went to, this happened, it’s in the moment.
It’s got to be real.
Now a footnote to that is if you’re thinking about your programming choice early on, the title is probably going to write itself.
Most of the big YouTubers think about what’s going to be a great thumbnail and what’s going to be a great title before they even go and make the video.
And all of those things speak to the three ingredients that drive click-through rate.
- The first is your programming choice (what you decide to make a video about.)
- The second is your thumbnail,
- and the third is your title.
Most people just think it’s the thumbnail and title combination.
But you got to go deeper than that and analyze your programming because your programming is going to drive your click-through rate.