What is a good YouTube Click-Through Rate?

YouTube Click-Through Rate is a critical metric for the success of your videos. It measures how well you convert the impressions your videos get into views. Many people assume that a higher Click-Through Rate is better, but it is not entirely true.

Click-Through Rate on YouTube is important to your channel.

What is a Click-Through Rate?

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who saw a search result, ads, or video thumbnail and then clicked through to access your website.

What are YouTube impressions?

With a YouTube video, impressions show how many times YouTube thumbnails will show up on YouTube. It has to be offered for at least one second, and 50% of it has to be visible to viewers. After that, youTube, based on algorithms, will show it to relevant audiences.

Impressions that are registered on YouTube Analytics come from YouTube search, homepage, YouTube feeds (including subscriptions, trending, history, and watch later), suggested results (recommendations on the right side of a watch page), videos, and playlists). 

Impressions that don’t appear in Youtube Analytics are the ones that come from external websites, apps, YouTube TV, cards and end screen, videos, emails, push notifications, and videos whose thumbnails have less than 50% visibility or appear in less than one second.

Click-Through Rate formula

Click-Through Rates can be calculated as the number of clicks your ads or video receives divided by the number of times your ads or video is shown.

Click-Through Rate Formula

For example, if your video has 100 impressions and 2 clicks, its Click-Through Rate is 2%.

A good YouTube Click-Through Rate

A high Click-Through Rate from YouTube thumbnails is not an indicator of success. Because if you do not deliver the promised content in the thumbnail, the viewers will not watch your video until the end. So you would have a low average view duration.

A high average view duration means a lot of people are watching your video all the through.

With a high average view duration, a low Click-Through-Rate happens when your thumbnails and titles are not getting clicked on. Still, your videos are getting distributed to a broader audience group than your core followers. 

YouTube said a good YouTube Click-Through Rate could be estimated in this way: “Half of all channels and videos on YouTube have an impression Click-Through Rate that can range between 2% and 10%.” 

How to define a good YouTube Click-Through Rate?

But to interpret the data, we should pay attention to particularly low or high numbers, not only looking at Click-Through Rates. It is best to compare the Click-Through Rate between videos over the long term rather than the short term.

How to increase YouTube Click-Through Rate

If you want engagement, comments, likes on your video, you have to get the clicks first. That is why increasing the Click-Through Rate will almost always be a good thing.

Here are ten specific tips to Increase Click-Through Rate on YouTube.

Focus intensely on a particular niche

Choose a potential niche

Your audiences have become your fans for some reasons like the format, personality, or topics you talk about. So, it would help if you leaned into whatever drives the most viewership. Then, as you make more videos on that specific content, you will hit more and more people of your core audiences. That will increase your YouTube Click-Through Rate. 

The crucial role of thumbnails

You have to think over what makes the audience consider before they will click on your video thumbnails. Take a look at some tricks relating to thumbnail creation below.

Attractive thumbnails increase Click-Through Rate.

Using complementary color

Select colors that work well together on your thumbnails. For example, if your background is blue, use a white foreground. Remember to use 2 or 3 colors in your color scheme to attract people to click on. Yellow, red, and green are the recommended ones for their visually remarkable effect.

Use bold text with a minimal number of texts

Large text fonts can stand out and be easier to read. But you only have a few seconds to motivate viewers to click on the image and watch your video. So, two or three words are enough to appear on the thumbnails. The simpler, the better.

Include your face with an expression

Faces and thumbnails tend to get more clicks than ones that don’t. Because people are attracted to faces and thumbnails, particularly to strong eye contact, make sure that they can see your face at a small size thumbnail such as the one on a mobile phone. 

Moreover, try to convey a story in your thumbnail by having an expression on your face. That way of communicating information can give the mood to the viewers before they watch your videos.

Use a high resolution

If you use a high resolution for your thumbnail with 1080 pixels, it will appear very clear at a small thumbnail size. Clear images attract more viewers and raise the YouTube Click-Through Rate.

Use a consistent style

If you are building your brand, you might need to use consistent color across all your channel art, such as your banner and thumbnails. Having a consistent design on your thumbnails makes it easier for viewers to recognize your channel when they find you on the search engines.

Split test your thumbnails

It is easy to fall in love with the design of your thumbnails, but your viewers may not like the design. Therefore it makes sense to split different test thumbnails to see which one gets the most clicks. 

Avoid the timestamp

YouTube displays a timestamp on the bottom right-hand corner of your video. Therefore make sure you don’t put a logo image or text in the bottom right-hand corner because the timestamp will cover it up.

Make titles more like headlines

Impressive blog headlines

Take some content from blogs or newspapers as examples. They title the news as a headline, and you should apply this way to your YouTube title. 

It should include the keyword and go along with the content also thumbnail because their eye-catching feature will improve the YouTube Click-Through Rate.

Problems that reduce Click-Through Rate that YouTubers need to avoid

Here are some reasons why YouTube Click-Through Rate could below.

Targeting the wrong audience

It shows that you have not understood your customers. For example, the way you present the content on the thumbnail, or the keywords you use cannot attract the audience to click on your channel. 

When you realize the Click-Through Rate of your channel appears to be relatively low, you should thoroughly analyze your target audience group. Again, YouTube Analytics is an effective tool that can help you to handle this problem.

Misleading the Click-Through Rate

If the Click-Through Rate can’t provide what the audiences expect when they see your thumbnail, that means you don’t consider your audience’s needs. 

What you have to pay attention to is the quality of your content. Ask yourself this question: What does the viewer want to get after clicking on your thumbnail? Then it would be best if you started creating content based on criteria to attract audiences.

Don’t care about Click-Through Rate data

Click-Through Rate provides much useful information for advertisements. So ignoring the data is not a good choice. It would be essential to look over your YouTube Click-Through Rate after having a considerable number of impressions. 

In short

YouTube Click-Through Rate is one of the most critical factors on this platform in terms of building audience community and growing your viewership. 

So, if you are having trouble increasing the Click-Through Rate on YouTube, do not hesitate to contact AudienceGain. We offer a wide range of services for the long-term development of your channel and committed supporters who are online 24/7 to answer all your questions. 

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