Hello again all! Forgive me everyone, this may be a little long winded on YT…
I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve learned this week regarding Thumbnails and Titles for your YouTube Long Form Videos… Everything they say about how you REALLY need to make sure they’re as good as you can get them is VERY true.
Let me explain… My latest video (Password Managers for 2024, I know, snore if you don’t care about the subject matter), I started with a title that I thought was okay and a thumbnail I had created:
Original Title:
2024 Top Password Managers: What you Don’t Know!
It did terrible… Re-evaluating the content I had in the video, I decided to change the title to:
Password Managers 2024 Reviewed!
and then finally change it again too:
Best Password Managers 2024
Because at it’s core, the video is almost completely about reviewing six different PW managers, anything that distracted from that was a ‘false promise’ and as viewers watched the video, they could feel like they were misled and left it. This started generating additional views.
In the views chart, you can see at time from 1 where I had about 20ish views how changing the title started the number of views climbing again, and at 2 you can see how it climbed even more when I aligned the title better with the content of the video. But you can also see on day 5 how the views flattened out again. That’s when I went on Fiverr.com and had a graphic artist make a new thumbnail for me. Once I put that on the channel, not only did the views start climbing again, but the one stat that is shocking me over the past 24 hours or so is the CTR or “Click Through Rate”
For those that don’t know what the CTR or click through rate is, it’s basically when a thumbnail is shown to someone, the rate at which people will click on it to view your video. Higher is better. When I launced the video, I was getting a CTR of 0.4-0.5% (which is terrible) and with the title changes, it came up a little bit (to just over 1%). Now with the thumbnail change, it’s now hitting just over 11% (and the average across almost 7 days is 1.4%)
THAT Click through Rate is AMAZING! It means that people are not only seeing the thumbnail but are clicking on it. That’s also being represented by the amount of time people are spending watching the 10 minute video.
You can see with the title changes and That’s just over 5 mintues (which believe me is pretty good).
To to sum up, Make killer Thumbnails (or get someone who’s good at it to do it for you, it’s more important than you know)! Make sure your title encompasses what your video is about!
Seven months in, I’m finally listening to all of the advice of others saying over and over MAKE YOUR THUMBNAILS AND TITLES FIRST AND THEN MAKE YOUR VIDEO FROM THERE!
So much for being a stubborn old Yankee from the North East US!
And remember my friends, Stay Grumpy!
Great article !!! Thanks for the info !!!