• Guest - Earn a FREE TubeBuddy Upgrade for being active on the forums! Click Here to learn how you earn free upgrades for TubeBuddy!
  • Guest - TubeBuddy has a discord! Click Here to join in the conversation!

YouTube Tips best way to optimize thumbnail CTR

oceansofflame

New Member
21
4
Hey guys,

I have seen the best thumbnails have been very curiosity driven images. This is my measure of ensuring thumbnails get a good CTR - always figure out what is the super curiosity factor for your niche.

What have been your guys's best strategies for getting the best thumbnail clickthrough?
 

CelticSpike

Active Member
TubeBuddy Pro
43
7
Hey guys,

I have seen the best thumbnails have been very curiosity driven images. This is my measure of ensuring thumbnails get a good CTR - always figure out what is the super curiosity factor for your niche.

What have been your guys's best strategies for getting the best thumbnail clickthrough?
I will let you know when it happens for me :joy: :joy:
I have tweaked mine loads but does not seem to help.

my thumbnails at the moment are crap, but the oddly enough the most click through thumbnails are images with females in it.

yeah that's accurate. :)
 

Stanley | Team TB

Amazingly Decent and Not-At-All Terrible Fishing
Administrator
TubeBuddy Staff
2,644
25
Subscriber Goal
250000
The best advice I can give and a practice that has worked very well for me is to search your video before you ever publish your video. Take a look at the videos that you will be competing against in search and study what they are doing in teir thumbnails. You are looking for two things;

First you want to pick them apart and see what elements they are all using that are attracting attention. Identify the best thumbnail and you are going to want to emulate and improve on what is working for them. You also want to eliminate things that may not be working. They are providing for you a roadmap of success; use it to do what they did but bettter.

And one of the ways you can do it better is by doing it different. Look at the collection of thumbnail on top of that list and see what you can do to stand out. Do they all use too much text? Are all the colors super muted? Does EVERYBODY use their face?

The best example of this that I have. last year I went and filmed a video at a local lake. We targeted the name of the lake as a high-priority keyword in advance and I took a look at the other video that topped the search ranks. All of the top videos were these gorgeous pictures of this amazing lake; clear, green water with beautiful blue skies. Every thumb. Green water, blue skies. So when we went out I wore a red shirt (red being the opposite of green). One year later and we are still holding strong as the #1 ranked video for that lake, and amazingly we did so with a 24% retention rate (one of the absolute worst retention rates we ever got). That red shirt basically made that video, and it is currently the video with the third highest view velocity on our channel.