How Important are CTR and AVD of Youtube Video?

This article is all about How Your Videos Are Getting Discovered on Youtube. How Important are CTR and AVD

Today we're getting to mention some of my favorite topics analytics of course and some of hopefully your favorite topics the algorithm.To assist creators understand how discovery works how your videos get discovered but it is a new feature that helps creators understand how their videos get discovered.

So these two metrics click-through rate and average view duration these are super important signals to understand your audience interest in your topic in your title and your thumbnail also as then your content once they start watching but we all know that these two metrics are not the entire story so we would like to travel in a bit deeper today and understand what are the cases when it isn't always about CTR and AVD.

If my video is doing super well I'm getting plenty of views and now I'm going and that I see on this report that the click-through rate is really as low as it's ever been why does this happen yeah so I'm really glad you asked that click-through rate may be a really tricky metric to understand so tons of creators if you enter you check out you're most successful videos, the videos with the most views. Those are literally the foremost likely to have rock bottom click-through rate those videos are being shown to a very broad audience who are less conversant in you and your content and it's natural for them to be less likely to click and on the opposite hand, a number of your smaller videos that were shown to a really relevant small the targeted audience is the foremost likely to click then. Those may need a very high click-through rate.

Sometimes refers to the present as a paradox and this is not a drag for our discovery systems because we actually have predictions where we will tell how likely a private user is to click and watch a given video now. However, it does make it hard sometimes for creators to interpret your video performance and if your title and thumbnails are working well and so what we recommend there's too always check out a mixture of your click-through rate and your impressions and this new feature.

These two metrics help us when to concentrate, to when your video could be performing and when that's thanks to your title or thumbnail or not in the future. We hope to possess thumbnail testing eventually that will assist in giving you even more concrete answers okay here's another one I've heard from YouTubers that are very aware that their click-through rate and average reiteration are important metrics and they are concerned that by getting a lot of traffic for instance from external websites or google search that their average view duration is actually dropping and they're having shorter views and that this may ultimately hurt their performance.

So we do know these concerns tons of creators. Once they see those overall metrics dropping and as we spoke about before that's not always a nasty thing. So in discovery, we actually check out how a video performs in the context it's shown. So when a video is shown on home how does it perform there and home and watch next each have their own ranking models so within the home page example we're watching when we're recommending a video on the home page to a given user how likely that user is to click watch and enjoy that video. In addition to factors like personalization like what proportion that user already watches that channel or topic.

So overall click-through rate and average iteration may be a pretty good the indicator about how your video is doing in general but it definitely doesn't cover all cases and every surface actually has its own ranking model so having more traffic from external is not getting to hurt your discovery or how your video is being recommended in-home page or watch next sometimes you've got to do deep dives into individual traffic sources the good thing about the new the module is that we actually already filter click-through rate and average view duration only for the home page and suggested video.

You do not need to worry about the consequences of external and other sources on those two metrics. Now let's take another case video length. We have heard from a bunch of you that we compare average view duration for videos that are of various lengths what do we have to mention.

Discovery we actually check out both relative and absolute watch time those are both meaningful signals. The way your videos are getting to be recommended. You would still get to do some cross-referencing. We swapped out average view duration for average percentage viewed because it's easier for brief videos to hit a very high amount of average percentage watched. We can only focus YouTubers on numerous metrics and that we chose average iteration because what proportion time somebody spends with you in your content may be a really strong indicator of interest that being said we would like videos of all links to succeed on youtube and get discovered.

So here's another one we get very frequently the click-through rate is ok average view duration is additionally fine yet the video remains underperforming for sure there must be some issue with the algorithm. This is often also the most common question that I receive from beginner YouTubers on my quora account and click-through rate and average reiteration are one among dozens of signals that we will use for search and discovery but there are also tons of other factors that are getting to influence what percentage impressions your videos get and the way many people watch them.

So I'm getting to mention three of them competition topic interest and seasonality, so competition is one factor which will influence your impressions which is our viewers choosing to observe more of other videos outside of your channel on our platform. So the high competition also can limit the amount of your time that folks are spending with you in your own content. The opposite one is topic interest so some people on youtube will watch videos a few really niche topic and some topics have bigger audience sizes than others

For example soccer, there are more people in the world curious about soccer than there are in golf sometimes soccer videos will get more views than golf and that is not because our algorithm features a preference for soccer videos it's just a features a larger potential audience size for that kind of topic. The other one is seasonality which gets into platform level trends about how many people are literally on youtube at different times of year watching videos. Another key moment where we get tons of those complaints is September when people are beginning to return to school and you see more viewership go towards the weekends so I had to say other factors which will influence impressions are competition potential audience size and topic interest and seasonality.

We all know that click-through rate and average reiteration are high. There are other reasons why your video could be performing even as usual or perhaps underperforming. So one final piece of feedback that we keep getting from all of you is around eager to compare click-through rate and average iteration not with yourself and your past videos but with other channels almost like yours.

How Important are CTR and AVD of Youtube Video?