YT Insights #5 – Traffic Sources

Let’s talk about each of the Traffic Sources on YouTube.

Understanding where your traffic is coming from can help you make decisions on how to improve the performance of a video, what new ideas to tackle in other videos, or what value your community sees in your channel.

We’ll also look at how to optimize your videos for the most important sources. I don’t recommend trying to optimize for more than one traffic source. As you read this it’ll become clear why it is very hard to do.

Here’s a little known fact. YouTube doesn’t have a ‘single’ algorithm, but several. Each one of these algorithms is optimized to suggest content in a different way, and they each reign over a different traffic source on YouTube, all controlled by an overall AI called ‘Google Brain’.

The reason your video might be doing well on one traffic source while bad on others is because they have the right signals for one algorithm, but not for others, and that’s Google Brain’s decision.

Remember the best mentality to ‘hack’ these algorithms is to understand that all they do is follow the viewer. We need to try to predict what content our viewers want to watch, instead of focusing on percentages of CTR and other noise data.

Let’s start with the most important one if you want to reach the biggest number of viewers possible.


Browse Features:

Traffic from the Main YT Homepage or Subscription Feed.


It is the primary way many viewers discover new content.

Completely dependent on your thumbnail and title (together, as a package).

You always want to aim for Browse, since most traffic on YouTube comes from it. But after a time, those impressions die down. While videos optimized for Search can become ‘evergreen content’.


To optimize for Browse you want to have a clear package. The idea of the video must be immediately clear, and grab a viewer’s attention, intrigue them so they need to click. We’ll go deeper into good practices to get people to click in the next post as this is one of the most important skills for a video’s success.


When you upload a new video, this is the first place YT will try to test the video with new viewers.
It will also prioritize showing it to people who have been engaging with your content recently (this doesn’t necessarily mean subscribers) as they are people who technically should be interested in it.

If they are not, it’s not the end of the world. But that means now YouTube doesn’t know what group of people to show it to, so it’ll begin to test, and it might take a long time to find the right audience for the video.

That’s why it is always recommended to keep your content in the same niche. So, your current community will be more likely to engage with it from the start.


85% of the traffic you get from Browse will Not be subscribed to you and probably never heard of you.
It is very important to focus the thumbnail on the Idea or the Hook for the video, and not on You as a creator.

Always assume that if a video is going to do well on Browse, then 8 out of every 10 viewers will have never watched a video from your channel. So making things like your face, or your brand a prominent part of the thumbnail ensures they will not click on it.

Clarity of Package (aimed towards a specific niche), and a Banger Idea (Original content or Unique angle) go hand in hand to make a video successful on Browse. We’ll dive deeper into this in future posts.

Here’s my last video, under "How viewers find this video" you can see 85% of its first 100k views came from Browse.


Suggested Videos:

These are the suggested videos to the side in the video page, or the ‘Up next’ at the end of a video.


To optimize for Suggested videos you need to create content that makes sense to watch one after another. For example I have a video on Post production, then another on How to cel shade before Post, then another on how to Animate before coloring, then another on how to draw better before animating.. etc

This creates longer watch sessions as viewers go from one to the next, YouTube picks up on this trail, and starts showing them at the top of the suggestions, on the right side of the video page.


Thumbnails show extremely small on Suggested, especially text, so Titles become more important than on Browse. Also, thumbnails should communicate that the videos are related to one another.


Ideally the Suggested section in your videos should be filled with your other videos.
You can try and force this by also suggesting your own videos in places like your End Screens, Video info cards, Video description and Pinned comment.
But the videos need to be related to the main topic of the video they are already watching.
Otherwise, viewers won’t click on them, and the suggested algorithm won’t make a connection.


You can also start ranking on another video’s suggested shelf.
For example, my Lackadaisy video has gotten almost 20% of its views for suggested traffic. Guess from where?

From the Lackadaisy pilot, of course. Which is in Tracy’s channel.

I purposely released my video at the same time as the pilot, so viewers would jump from watching the pilot to watching my video, and then YT made the connection to start suggesting mine in the pilot’s video page.

As long as the Lackadaisy Pilot keeps getting views, a percentage of those viewers will keep clicking on my video.


YouTube Search:
Traffic from people searching things on Youtube.

Youtube is the #2 largest search engine in the world, #1 being Google (their parent company) we must never underestimate this.

Search Engine Optimization is the key to having a good performance in the Search algorithm, which means ranking higher when someone searches for a term.


My ‘Clip Studio Animation’ and ‘PostProduction for Animation’ tutorials rank first or second when searching for those specific terms.

I have to be honest with you. I didn’t do any SEO optimization to ensure this. I just made the best tutorials that I could, and I think people appreciate that, and the algorithm picks up on it (using viewer satisfaction as a measure) and then ranks them higher.


The reason I don’t believe as much in SEO is with the advent of AI into all search engines, this area is changing extremely fast. I believe the old SEO rulebook is dead. All we can do is use relevant keywords in our title, optimizing for HUMANS, not for bots (meaning don’t make it a letter soup just to cram all the words that you can there). And make the best content we can.


Closed Captions (subtitles) are a great tool here. Provide closed captions (subtitles) to make your content accessible and potentially improve search rankings as the bots do read them. (You can use Adobe Premiere or Davinci Resolve to generate these subs with AI, then correct them a little).

Tags do not influence search at all. Your description, captions and chapters (if you have any) do influence it.


Even though my CSP Animation Tutorial is almost 2 years old, it still gets thousands of daily views. And 40% of that traffic comes from Search

 
This covers the 3 most important sources of views. I hope my videos can serve as an example of how you can optimize for each of these sources of traffic, and their advantages.


Other sources:

YouTube Shorts:

Traffic from the YouTube Shorts shelf and other Shorts features.

This is a whole other can of worms.

I currently don’t engage with Shorts. They are extremely volatile, which is good if you want to farm viewers and subscribers.

But I consider them “low quality attention”.

We’ll talk about this in the future, but unless you can do something with this low quality attention (redirect them to long form, or another platform of yours) then I don’t recommend farming it.

At least in its current state.


External:

Views from websites and apps that embed your videos or link to them on YouTube.

I seldom advertise my videos in social media. The reason is our social media is usually filled with people that don’t really care about the content (family and friends) who will click and immediately leave. Or people who do care, but they are not in a position to watch the video right now, so again they will just click on the video and leave.

This gives the algorithm signals that the video is not good. I would rather just let the recommendation algorithm do its thing and find viewers for me. Its incredibly adept at doing that.

Playlists:

Views from a playlist.

One key piece of advice: Playlists are searchable.

I recommend using titles in your playlists that entice people to click on them. Rather than ‘Tutorials by Manu’ I use ‘Complete Digital Art Tutorials’. So more people will be inclined to check them out.

Channel Pages:

Traffic from your YouTube channel page.

Notification:

Traffic from notifications.

Direct or Unknown:

Traffic from direct URL entry, unidentified apps, or other unspecified sources.

Video Cards and End Screens:

Views from clickable elements placed in videos.

Other YouTube features:

Traffic from within YouTube that doesn't fall into the above categories.

A catch-all for various other features and can provide insight into newer or less common discovery mechanisms. Example: Community Tab or video descriptions in other channel's videos.


In the next post we’ll talk about how to get people clicking on your videos.

Talk soon!