YT Insights #1 – The 2 Signals Youtube Gives You (and why you should care)

Going into your YT Studio dashboard, it is no accident that the 2 performance metrics that you get from your latest upload are: Impressions Click-through Rate and Average View Duration.

If your video performs well in these 2 metrics, your video will get more views. Let's start with the Basics.

Impressions Click-through Rate (CTR)

First, we need to understand the difference between IMPRESSIONS and VIEWS.

Impressions are when YouTube literally shows your ‘video thumbnail + title’ to someone.

By showing it, I mean they see it either in their homepage, their suggested videos sidebar, in the ‘up next’ section at the end of the video, or in the search results when they are searching for something.

YT can’t force anyone to watch a video they don’t want to. It is only when that person clicks on that video, and watches at least 30 seconds of it, that the Impression becomes a View (for videos shorter than 30 seconds, they need to watch it to its entirety to count as a view).

So Views are how many times someone has clicked on your video, and watched at least 30 seconds of it.

While Impressions are how many times YouTube served that video to a person, to see if they wanted to click on it or not.

The ratio between how many Impressions turned into Views, is your Impressions CTR, and its measured with a percentage.

Why do we care?

The YouTube algorithm takes a high click-through rate as a sign that the video covers a topic people want to watch. And it will try to suggest it to more potential viewers if people keep clicking on it.

But what a ‘high’ click-through rate is varies a lot depending on how competitive your niche is, or how sought after the topic is.

*Also, the more views your video gets, the lower the CTR will be, because it will start to reach a broader audience that might not be interested in the video. This happens every time.

In Vid Summit 2022, a YouTube employee revealed that for every 100 Views your video gets, the algorithm will push it to receive 700 new Impressions the next week, on average.

For example, If your CTR in that video is 3%, that means those 700 new impressions will generate 21 new views, which in turn generate 150~ impressions the next week (following the same principle), and so on. That's the reason videos slowly die through the months until they stop getting views.

This also means that most YouTube videos (unless they are tied to a certain time-sensitive topic, like news or updates) will get MOST of their views in the months following their release, instead of their first weeks.

This is very important. People think every video performs like the top YouTuber's, where all the views come in the first week. My first video on the channel (almost 2 years old) still gets thousands of views every single day. We’ll talk more about WHY when we get into traffic sources.

Also, this might be obvious but just in case: Click-through rate depends almost entirely on the thumbnail and title for your video (and I say almost, because videos auto-play on your phone, making the first 5 seconds of the video part of the CTR package).

Don’t worry, we’ll talk more about this in other posts.

In the last 365 days, my channel has gotten 44.7 million impressions, and an average 3.9% of those people turned into viewers for 2.6 million views.

Average View Duration (AVD)

This is the other sign that the algorithm uses to detect promising videos.

Youtube’s top priority is to create long watch sessions so they can serve you more ads. More time on their platform = more money for them, which is why they want to serve videos that people watch for longer.

Making your viewers watch for longer, and creating long watch sessions are broad topics that we'll have to discuss in other posts. For now just know that the longer your viewers watch your video, the better it will perform in the algorithm.

This does NOT mean 'we have to make longer videos'.
There is another metric tied to AVD and it is APV (Average percetange viewed). So if I make a 2 hour video, and people watch 6 minutes on average. Sure, its more than the average 3:30 AVD of my channel. But it also means people watch only 5% of that video, so it "must" be a bad video for the algorithm.

Next week we’ll talk about the third hidden factor that the algorithm cares about, its history, and why we can't measure it.

Talk soon!