What Is A Good Impression Click-Through Rate On YouTube? (In Detail)

Let us understand what does impression click-through rate mean on YouTube analytics.

As per YouTube, Impressions click-through rate, or CTR, shows you what percentage of your impressions turned into views. This measures how often viewers watched your video after seeing its thumbnail.

The impressions acquired can be from various places.

Here are a few:

  1. Someone searched on YouTube, and your video came up in the results
  2. YouTube suggested your video in the recommended section
  3. Your subscribers were notified when you published a video
  4. Your video thumbnail was shown in the Playlist
  5. Your video thumbnail was shown on your channel page

However, when you share your videos on external platforms like social media, those are not included in the calculation since they cannot be counted.

Quick Tip

You can use thumbnail split-testing software to drastically improve the click-through rate. Check the software here.

What is a good impression click-through rate?

As per YouTube, 50% of the channels have a click-through rate between 2% to 10%.

However, a good click-through rate varies based on the number of views. 

Practically, the click-through rate decreases as the number of views increases.

Based on my experience and analysis, here are some reference ranges of a good click-through rate:

  • Views below 1000 can have a CTR between 25% and 35%
  • Views between 10,000 to 20,000 can have a CTR between 18% and 25%
  • Views between 100,000 to 200,000 can have a CTR between 10% and 15%
  • Views above one Million can have a CTR between 2% and 5%

As mentioned above, these are not average click-through rates. A majority of the channels don’t get these kinds of click through rates.

Related questions:

Are YouTube Click through rates important?

Yes, YouTube click-through rates are important. However, you should also take other metrics into consideration.

For example, your video’s watch time is also an important metric to rank on the search result.

PewDiePie had mentioned in one of his videos that he would not have been where he is now, if not for his photoshop skills.

What he means by that?

His photoshop skills helped him to make a better thumbnail, which increases the click-through rate.

So, without a doubt, click-through rate is one of the critical factors to reach more users.

How to increase the click-through rate of your videos?

You can increase the click-through rate by making a click-worthy thumbnail, optimizing your video title, and the description.

Description?

The first two lines of your description are visible in the search result.

So, you can write a hook to grab the viewer’s attention and make them click on your video.

How to make click-worthy thumbnail?

First, look up on YouTube and see the thumbnails of the first three videos in the search result.

That should give you an idea of what type of thumbnails are doing well for that search term.

Now go ahead and create something similar to those thumbnails and add your own touch to make it look even better.

Of-course you need to have above-average designing skills, but it is easy to learn from tons of free content available on the internet.

What others read next: 4 Royalty-free image sites to make amazing YouTube video thumbnails

When it comes to optimizing your video title and tag, I would recommend you search for a more competitive term that is similar to your search term.

Example:

Your search term would be like, “What is a good click-through rate on YouTube?” but a more competitive term would be, “What is a good click-through rate.”

So, the broader the term the more competitive it becomes in general.

Now you use a similar title and description on your YouTube videos.

By this way you are going to have much better thumbnail, title, and description for your video.

That is how you can increase your video’s click-through rate.

Hold on. There is another part to increasing the CTR of your video.

The second part of improving your CTR is to grow a YouTube channel in a particular niche.

A broader topic will bring in a broader audience to your channel, and that will affect your CTR.

How?

The videos are initially shown to your subscribers before broadcasting to other users on YouTube.

So, if your subscribers do not click on your videos, then your CTR will be affected in the early stage.

This can have a significant impact on your video ranking.

So make sure to keep these two aspects in your mind while building your mind to get an increase in the impression click-through rate of your YouTube videos.

That’s it for now, see you in my next post.

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