YT Insights #6 – The CTR Secret (Make people CLICK)

In this entry we’ll talk about getting viewers to click on your video.

It doesn’t matter if you made the best video in the world. It will struggle if your packaging (thumbnail + title) doesn't convey a clear idea of:

-WHAT the video is about

-WHY your audience should click on it

We need to understand YouTube users don’t see your great video behind the click. They only see your title and thumbnail.

Figure this out first, and it will dictate how you’ll make the video. All big creators do this. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but the rest of the video doesn’t matter if they don’t get past this thumbnail and title.

Hence why it is highly recommended to make the thumbnail and title BEFORE even starting work on the video. If you can’t figure out a title and thumbnail, then your idea needs maturing.

We’ll talk about different ways of finding good ideas in future posts.

For now let’s assume you have a banger idea. How do you portray it in its packaging?

First, let’s establish that thumbnail and title are a single unit. They should work together.

Together they convey a story.

Second, let’s break one of the biggest myths on YouTube. Let me make this very clear:

CTR (Click-through rate) is NOT responsible for a video’s performance.

It is simply not. There is no magic number of CTR that you hit and then the algorithm starts pushing your video. It IS correlated to a video’s performance, but has no causality in it
(meaning it allows us to understand if people are clicking on a video or not, but it is not the cause of Why a video does well in the algorithm).

The purpose of CTR is gauging how a video is performing with our audience. It is powerful when used as a measuring tool, but we need to understand that a video will do well because of the video, not because of a specific CTR value that it hits.

This change in mentality is important so we stop chasing numbers and metrics, and instead focus on producing good content for our audience, which will translate into good metrics.

Lots of people lose themselves trying to ‘’increase the numbers’’ of a video.
If these metrics were the cause of a video’s success, then they would be a consistent correlation between them and video’s performance

(For example, if a channel gets 1 million views in a video, and then 10k views in the next video, does this mean its CTR is 100 times greater? Of course not.
It is simply not related to these numbers. They are not consistent, not through-out niches, not even through-out the same channel.

Let’s talk about Thumbnails:

Your main goal should always be CLARITY.

Your idea dictates the size of the market that it can reach.
If I make a YouTube tutorial, I know only those who are interested in learning animation will want to click on it. It is a limited audience.
If I make an animation meme/challenge, then anyone interested in animation can watch it, reaching a wider audience.

Your Packaging should be optimized to maximize its reach of this entire audience. And the way we do this is to be absolutely clear with what the video is about, and who it is aimed for.

Your video idea should do all the lifting in terms of having people click on it.
There’s no need to try and clickbait people with empty phrases like ‘’the secret’’ and ‘surprised faces’ in the thumbnail. This way we can remove any noise from the results.
If a video does poorly it would be because the idea wasn’t as strong. And if it does well, it will be because the idea is really strong.

Now that we’re moving towards Multi-language audio tracks, I would even recommend using the least amount of words in your thumbnail as possible. If you can show what your video is about with just images, then the clearer it’ll be.
(I’m working towards this myself with my future uploads)

How many words inside the thumbnail can you see here?

If viewers can understand what the video is about in a fraction of a second, then we can move onto the next priority.

Having a visual hook.

Portraying the idea in the most intriguing way possible.

Not only should the idea be clear, but also the reason why the viewer should click on it has to be immediately clear as well.

For this you have to figure out what is your value proposition for the video.

It can be entertainment, motivation or education. But it should be clear what the viewer will get in exchange for the time they give you by clicking on your video.

Clickbait

Overpromising only leads to clickbait when you can’t deliver on what you promised.

I personally believe we CAN clickbait, as long as we can overdeliver with our value proposition.

You can see it in my videos.
I always make sure to deliver on the promise I make in my title and thumbnail, no matter how clickbaity it may feel.
Also I try to reassure the viewer that I WILL deliver on that promise in the first 10 seconds of the video (this deals more with AVD which we’ll see in the next post)

Finally, we would focus on all the jazz you always hear about (composition, saturated colors, contrast of values, not more than 3 elements..).

The reason is our thumbnail will NEVER stand in a vacuum.

Wherever it shows up it will always be surrounded by the best videos on the platform for each specific user. And it needs to beat them in order to get the click + the view.

Other common tips are to use as few elements as possible. And that everything in the thumbnail should read in a split second. Remember CLARITY.

What to do if my video is underperforming?

Remember CTR is not the reason a video does well or bad, but it serves as a measure of how its doing.

Changing the Title without changing the Thumbnail barely makes any difference. I have tested this in half of my videos and I’m very confident that people don’t read the titles throughout but rather skim through them.

But changing the Thumbnail DOES Impact the video's performance.

A good backup is to at least have an idea for a Plan B thumbnail, in case the first is not performing well.

The biggest culprit of underperforming packaging is people don’t understand what the video is about.

I know its tempting to start branding your videos with your face and your characters from the start, but the video’s idea should always be the focus on a good thumbnail.

If after trying different thumbnails that do accomplish what we’ve studied here, the video is still dead, then the second most common culprit is..

The idea is just not appealing to a broad audience.

This is hard to hear as we all put a lot of love into every single video. But sometimes your audience just doesn’t care about the topic. Or they Do, but they don’t want to hear it from You specifically.

Remember it has to be very clear for the viewer WHY they should click on the video. Sometimes the reason is not strong enough.

In that case, don’t waste too much time trying to fix an older video.
Move onto the next one. I promise you if your next video does well, then the video that underperformed is very likely to start getting views again, as viewers try to find more of your content.

The best way to revive an old video is not to change the title and thumbnail, is to make another video, and try to make it better.

The secret element for good CTR

There IS a hack that can make your audience more likely to click on all of your videos.

And it is consistently delivering high quality content to them.
If you manage to convince your audience that your value propositions are always worth their time, they’ll always click no matter what.

This explains the success of channels like ‘Moistcr1tical’. Sure, they are just talking to the camera. But nobody does it like them, and the audience know what they get into and love it. They know the value proposition Charlie offers and click on the video to experience it.

In next post we’ll talk about AVD (Average View Duration), the second metric that is held as the deciding factor on if a video performs well or not.

Talk soon!