Win the click, get the views! Want to improve your click through rate, get more views and grow your channel? You need to work on your titles and winning that click using the CURIOSITY GAP! Make people intrigued, and they will fall into your videos and follow you through to the end of your story content.
As soon as you have uploaded a video, YouTube starts surfacing it to relevant audiences. Based on hundreds of signals, our systems determine which viewers are most likely to watch your video and continue to surface the video to audiences as long as it remains on YouTube.
You can do some keyword research using TubeBuddy to find the perfect tags and keyphrases to target.
Higher click-through rate alone isn’t a strong indicator of success. To get a full picture of what attracts and engages viewers on your channel or videos, follow our tips on using impressions and click-through rate data. In general, the best way to get more impressions is to consistently make great quality content that viewers love.
Why are my impressions and CTR really low?
If it seems like your impressions are lower than they should be, here are some things to keep in mind when looking at your impressions data:
- Not every instance in which a viewer sees a video thumbnail will count as an impression, and not all views come from thumbnail impressions. Learn what counts as a registered impression.
- Older videos may have more impressions, as they’ll continue to be surfaced to audiences as long as they’re on YouTube. To get a more defined view of how your videos are currently doing, look at the first 7 days after uploading to compare impressions data for different videos.
- As your videos become more popular, they may be shown to a wider audience beyond your core viewers. This can result in a lower click-through rate (even if you see an increase in overall views and watch time).
- Use the traffic sources report to see click-through rate by traffic source. This can give you an indication of how your thumbnails and titles are doing in converting impressions to views in different contexts.
Avoid trying to increase your CTR by using thumbnails or titles that are clickbait. YouTube will recommend a video to viewers if the video is relevant to the viewer and if other viewers find the video interesting, as reflected by the video’s average view duration. Clickbait videos tend to have low average view duration and therefore are less likely to get recommended by YouTube. You can tell if your thumbnail is clickbait if it is getting high CTR but low average view duration and lower than expected impressions.
