How Youtube Fools You (High CTR = More Views)
We've all heard from various youtube gurus CTR is one of the most important metric on youtube to get more views. But it's actually a lie - here's how.
"CTR is a useless Metric (Without the actual context behind the CTR percentage)"
Lets bust some common myths first.
High CTR ≠ More Views:
CTR (Click-Through Rate) measures how many people click on a video after seeing the thumbnail, relative to how many people were shown the video. So, high CTR means a high percentage of those who saw the video clicked on it.
More views, however, depend on factors like how often the video is recommended, the reach of the video (how many people see it), and how compelling the video is to both cold and warm audiences.
For example:
A video with a very high CTR but low views could be shown to a small, highly targeted audience. This means only a few people saw it, but most who did click on it.
Conversely, a video with lower CTR but higher views could be shown to a much broader audience, but not everyone is compelled to click. Even though CTR is lower, the sheer volume of impressions can lead to more views.
More Views ≠ High CTR:
High views are often a result of the video being recommended or shown to a large audience. However, CTR might be lower because the video is being shown to a wider range of people—many of whom are not as interested (cold audience).
For example, a trending or viral video may have a huge number of views but could have a low CTR because it was shown to a large number of people who weren’t specifically interested in the topic but clicked out of curiosity.
Now getting back to CTR as a useless metric:
Example: Let’s say there’s a YouTube channel with 1,000 subscribers.
The first video on the channel gets shown to 100 (100 views = impresssions) of its own subscribers (warm audience).
10 people click on it, so the CTR comes out to be 𝟭𝟬%.
Now, let’s say the same video is shown to 100 (100 views = impresssions) non-subscribers who don’t know about this channel (cold audience).
5 people click on it, so the CTR is 𝟱%.
Misinterpretation of CTR:
When looking at this in YouTube Studio, you might think, "Oh, I should probably change the thumbnail because the CTR is bad."
But that's not the real reason for the lower CTR, right?
The drop in CTR is due to the difference between warm and cold audiences.
The mistake youtube makes is it adds up all type of audiences - cold, warm, casual viewers, referral viewers etc..
Conclusion:
So, unless YouTube provides the context behind the CTR it's a misleading metric to focus on because it becomes a NOISE.
Similarly AVD (average view duration is a false metric aswell,more on this in the next post).