if you've ever been confused by your click-through rate or you don't know how to interpret what it is that you're saying or you don't know what's good or what's bad or what to even think about your click-through rate this video is going to demystify all of that for you and by the time we're finished you're going to have a very good understanding of your click-through rate and how to look at it when you're looking in your YouTube analytics engaging that against the performance of your videos and we're starting right now this video is part of
my subscriber q a series where I answer your questions about YouTube Today's question comes from Rebecca Rowe from simple Finance Rebecca says I have a question about click-through rates and the algorithm I've always thought that I have a bad click-through rate because I average about three to five percent however my most recent videos also have an average of 5.7 percent not that much higher and has brought in over a thousand views in the first two days my other videos average 40 to 100 views in that period so is it not really the click-through rate that
matters as much and then she hasn't some additional information there and says my question is should I pay more attention to the click-through rate and try to improve my thumbnails or should I just keep making my videos and wait for YouTube to find the Right audience for my other videos as well so first thank you Rebecca for that question so when it comes to the answer to this instead of just telling you from my experience I'm actually going to show you what YouTube has to say about the questions that you have so that way you're
getting your answer from their official documentation so here in the YouTube help Pages they have the question of how do I know if my impression click-through rate is high or low what YouTube says is Impressions click-through rate measures how often viewers watch the video after seeing a registered impression on YouTube if you're new to YouTube an impression is when they show your video to somebody on the platform it likely represents a subset of your Channel's total views since not all impressions are counted in this metric such as those on external websites or end screens Impressions
click-through rate will vary based on the type of content audience and where the YouTube impression was shown keep in mind that your video thumbnails are always competing against other videos whether on the home page up next or on the watch page in search results and even in subscription feeds so what they're saying right there is when you publish your videos that you are competing with pretty much everything that YouTube thinks is a good fit for your viewers so when you are looking at your click view rate it varies just based on the other videos that
you're competing against there as well so if a bunch of other videos are kind of taking the traffic then in that particular case even though you could be getting Impressions there you could just be getting beaten out by all the other videos that you're competing with at that point in time even if your click-through rate is a little bit higher now if you want to know what's good when it comes to your click-through rate here's what YouTube has to say about that half of all the channels and videos on YouTube have an impression CTR that
can range between two percent and ten percent the thing that is the most important to remember here is that your click-through rate you need to make sure that you're looking at that compared to the Impressions that you're getting so for example if you get 100 Impressions on a video and you have a high click-through rate on that well in that particular case it's only been sampled to a hundred people and based on how YouTube works out of those 100 people those are the most likely people to enjoy your content that's why YouTube is showing it
to them first that's also why when you are publishing your content you'll see a higher click-through rate when you first publish your video and then it can start falling down from there not always but that's extremely common now the next thing I want to bring to your attention is this YouTube also says that new videos are channels like those less than a week old or videos with fewer than 100 views can see an even wider range if a video gets a lot of Impressions such as if it appears on the home page it's natural for
the CTR to be lower videos where most of the impressions are from sources like your channel page may have a higher click-through rate ultimately it's best to compare ctrs between videos over the long term and keep in mind how their traffic sources will affect click-through rates now if you're new to YouTube this might sound like a bunch of gibberish because they're talking about traffic sources and click-through rates and Impressions and all these things but what your traffic sources are is on YouTube they have a handful of different pages where you're going to pull most of
your traffic from so that's going to be home pages it's going to be suggested videos and it's going to be YouTube search so when you go into your traffic sources report in your YouTube analytics those are three of the options that you're going to see but you're also going to see external you're going to see Channel pages and things like that so when you are looking at your click-through rate make sure that you're not looking at this particular part of your analytics for your click-through rate instead what you want to do is for the video
that you're looking at the click-through rate you actually want to click into the video and then go into the analytics for the individual video and then from there you want to go into your advanced mode of the analytics then into your traffic sources and once you're in there then you're actually going to see how your videos are performing in all of the different pages of YouTube which gives you a lot better insights on your real click-through rate and here's another really important thing that YouTube says about your click-through rate and trying to raise your click-through
rate avoid trying to increase your CTR using thumbnails or titles that are click bait YouTube will recommend a video to viewers if the video is relevant to them and if the video's average view duration indicates that viewers find it interesting click bait videos tend to have low average view duration and therefore less likely to get recommended by YouTube you can tell if your thumbnail is Click bait if it gets a high CTR but low average view duration and lower than expected Impressions now that part is extremely important so they don't go into the Nuance of
it here but here's what that actually means so when YouTube is serving your videos to people on their platform the only thing that the system is wanting or the only thing that YouTube wants is that when they present your videos to people if it's something they're interested in then they click on it and they come in and they have a good experience with your content so YouTube is trying to keep viewers satisfied and keep them on their platform by showing them the right content at the right time that they're most likely to engage with and
enjoy because of that it's important to make sure that when you are looking at your click-through rate you're not just looking at the click-through rate number itself but you're also looking at the watch time that's being generated from your video so when you are looking at the effectiveness of your thumbnail what you actually want to look at is of course you want to look at the number for the click-through rate compared to the Impressions that it's getting because the Impressions part is really important but you also want to look to see how those Impressions led
to watch time so for example if somebody's interacting with your content and they're leaving quickly just like that message that I just showed you then YouTube's going to deem it as a a non-satisfactory experience however if somebody clicks on your video and your video matches their expectation they're more likely to watch that video for a longer period of time which then tells YouTube that they're enjoying your content and that you're not misleading people which is giving them what they want and in return they're going to give you what you want as the content creator which
is showing your videos to more people that are also likely to enjoy it and have that great experience and another thing that you want to think about when it comes to your click-through rate and how it relates to the watch time that you're getting on the videos is when somebody is looking at your thumbnail and your title from the outside the only information they have about your content is what they're seeing right there so that expresses the topic of the video to them and whatever it is that they might experience in the content so because
of that you have to make sure when you're putting your thumbnails together and your titles that you are ensuring that you're building the right expectation for what it is that they're going to get inside of the video and when you do that it's going to create a much better experience for your viewers which then is going to help you YouTube again recommend it to more and more people so what you want to think about Rebecca and anybody else that's dealing with this is when you are looking at your click-through rate especially when you're comparing it
to other videos you need to make sure that you're also considering the Impressions that it's getting and the watch time that's happening on those videos as well in terms of the actual watch time and the percentage viewed because those are also a reflection of the experience that people are having and if it's satisfactory or not and when you're comparing videos another thing that you want to make sure you're thinking about is okay if I have a video that's getting a 5.7 click-through rate after let's say a thousand Impressions on YouTube home page and then I
have another video that has a six percent click-through rate also on YouTube home page with 200 Impressions even though it might look like that six percent is doing better it has a lot fewer Impressions which means it's been tested against fewer people so because of that it's easier to keep that number High whereas you've had a thousand Impressions on the 5.7 which makes that one a stronger click-through rate because it's been shown to more people and more people have responded positively to it if you want to learn more about YouTube and see other videos in
this series click into this playlist right here and if you want your question answered make sure that you reply to my community posts when I do post the option there to ask your question for these particular videos thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time
