I Learned Something New About The YouTube Algorithm

I just learned something new about the YouTube algorithm that's going to help your long form videos get far more views and I'm going to tell you right now it has nothing to do with the click through rate the average watch time or any of the other basic tips that gurus give you and the best part about it YouTube has not hidden this from us it's right inside of our analytics and I'm going to show you exactly what it is recently I had a video on my channel that broke out and started getting far more views than my videos typically get within a short period of time and so I got interested why was this video performing so well and so I had to look at some of the more common things to see if that was the issue and I determined that it was not so I'm going to walk you through that process so you can see which aspects of this video are performing as usual that way we can try to isolate what's making this video perform so successfully so this is the video that we're going to be talking about right here is why your followers never see your content and how to fix it and something I want you to pay attention to on the screen right now is the fact that the tags are not performing well and this video is not getting its views use from search so we can take tags off of the table and even if we look at the video on YouTube it only has 65 comments and compared to the number of views that the video has that's a very low number for a video on my channel so here's an overview of how the video is performing on my channel so far it's only been live for 5 days and 29 minutes and it already has 6. 8 th000 views not a lot of views to some people but for my Channel That's exceptional it has almost 547 watch hours 156 subscri subscribers and it's made $41 but let's go back to the subscribers so there's a typical 1% rule that I've discovered on YouTube and a lot of people have also discovered this independently themselves but basically 1% of the people who view your video can be expected to subscribe if the video is standard quality and this principle holds true not just for individual videos but for whole channels you can look at the total number of views multiply by 1% and see if it matches if it doesn't match and it's more like 2 or 3% then it's an indication that the videos are performing exceptionally well it's great content and it's converting people to subscribers so for this particular video at a 1% conversion rate I would have around 68 or 70 subscribers but here you can see that I have almost 2. 3 times as many subscribers as I typically would so this is a good indication that the actual video is converting well and people enjoy the watching experience if you look on the other side of the screen where I was just a moment ago you can see that the majority of The View for this video are coming from brows they're not coming from suggested other channels they're not coming from search or any of the other places where videos pop up on YouTube it's only surfacing and brows for the most part and it's getting a lot of views and a lot of Engagement and subscribers and it's performing really well there but this is what YouTube actually had to say about it something about this video was especially appealing to your audience causing it to be recommended on YouTube home and up next more often than usual reflect on what's different about this video so that you can keep making content that engages viewers more views from YouTube recommendations this video got 6,000 views from recommendations on YouTube home and up next videos on your channel typically receive 1,000 to 1500 in this time frame so it's outperforming my typical YouTube videos when it comes to recommendations by up to four times and if we do an even deeper dive into the YouTube recommendations we can see that YouTube home and not YouTube up next is the one that's carrying this video so when people are opening YouTube is placing my video on the home screen but something that was confusing me about this video was the actual clickthrough rate so if we come to the reach we can see that this video has 70,000 impressions in only 5 days and impressions are something that I don't think a lot of YouTube experts talk about enough because the number of Impressions can be a good indication of how well your video is received by your audience if your audience receives the video well then there are great chances that YouTube is going to promote it and give it more Impressions now whether people click on the video or not is entirely up to your thumbnail but YouTube is going to give the video a chance once they get a good sounding from likes on the video and also from surveys that they send people to ask about the video about whether they should promote this video or not now remember what YouTube said something about this video was especially appealing to your audience causing it to be recommended on YouTube so I've noticed for a very long time that subscribers are number two to monthly viewers because the people who view your content on a monthly basis are your actual audience and your subscribers are just the people who are saying hey I'm really interested and want to keep up with what you're talking about and YouTube uses your individual audience to determine how well your video actually performs not someone else's and so I think of it like Tom Hanks and Cast Away when he was trying to get over the break point and he just couldn't get past it until he finally made this makeshift sale and he got past it and that's how

your audience operates when I post a new piece of content how well it's receive with my audience is going to determine if I can get beyond the breako get recommended on YouTube and reach new audiences like I did in this particular instance four times more than I normally do within this time frame let me make that clear it's only within this 5-day time frame but it's still a lot in my eyes the clickr rate is only 7. 2% it's not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination most of my videos these days typically have around 11 to 14% clickthrough rate so for this video to Peak at an 88. 7% clickthrough rate and still perform as well as it's performing right now is a little bit baffling to me so typically what happens when you post a new piece of content and it sits well with your audience and YouTube begins to share it to more and more people the click-through rate is naturally going to decline because the more people they share it with the less people who are actually going to be interested in that video so although this video peaked at 8. 7% Which is far below the typical average for my channel these days and the fact that did have me a little baffled at first I do understand that the clickthrough rate is declining at a much slower Pace given the number of Impressions than it typically would and a typical scenario if YouTube had given one of my other videos 70,000 Impressions within 5 days the clickthrough rate may have dropped to about 3 or 2% I've seen it happen and before you say it I'm not saying that dropping to two or 3% is quote unquote a Bad Thing their videos with 2 3% click-through rate with millions of views because they kept reaching new audiences and getting more views and growing but again we're talking about within a 5-day time frame only and based on my Channel's experience but I want you to see what YouTube says about the click through rate inside of the YouTube analytics app on my phone if we click right here next to the click through rate it's going to give us some information about why it's hollowed out green it's still green but it's hollowed out so this is an indication that it's on the decline the views are still going up but the clickthrough rate is going down the average view duration is going down if we click on this it says this video is reaching a wider audience on YouTube leading to a lower click-through rate than usual wider audiences are often less likely to choose to watch a video but the lower clickthrough rate is not hurting this video's view count now this is what I'll say to that I've seen that message dozens of times in the YouTube analytics app and one thing that's always happened after I've seen that for the most part is that the clickthrough rate would then go down again and YouTube would say this video is not performing as well maybe change the title or the thumbnail Etc and so the fact that the clickthrough rate is holding right here with 70,000 Impressions is a good indication that this video has the potential to find even more success if it can get through this next rough patch I think but now let's look at the average view duration is about 4 minutes and 50 something seconds so here's a chart of how well my videos typically perform and you can see that this video is actually underperforming when it comes to the average view duration even with the intro only about 61% are sticking around to continue watching the video which is below normal it's not typical and even the audience that does stay to watch the video is not watching for as long as my other videos but let's see if we can get an even more detailed understanding of what's going on here and try to make some sense of this so let's click on the C more button and what we want to do here is compare this video to videos of similar length on YouTube this is an 18-minute video so let's see how well it performs against other 18-minute videos across all genres on YouTube and so compared to other videos it's above average in the beginning it's average in the middle it's above average towards the end again and it ends average so it's average above average it's an average video something else I was looking at about this video that was standing out to me was the like percentage for a very long time the like percentage was 100% for the first two or 3 days and just recently this video picked up two dislikes but people largely like this piece of content and they're probably responding well to the surveys also and I'm sure that plays a part into the video being received well by my audience and getting recommended but this is the fact that I do believe that caused this video to perform so well if we look at the audience metric for this video we can see that initially it performed really well with my audience that's the purple line so although this video has 6. 8 th000 views it only has 4,300 unique viewers that's the number of individual people who've actually watched this video and of those 4,300 people 2,000 of them are returning viewers and 2,300 of them are new viewers for an average of 1. 2 views per viewer but if we take the last three days off this is what we have for the first day there were 900 returning viewers and 300 new viewers and on the

second day there were 400 returning viewers and 440 new viewers and so new viewers started to overtake the returning viewers on the second day by a slim margin so if we round those numbers off just to keep the math simple that would give us 1400 returning viewers in the first two days and 700 new viewers for a total of 2100 unique viewers at that time the video had only received 2,890 views and that was the first time that I finally realized that what was going on with this particular video was that the people who typically watch my content my returning viewers were actually returning to this particular video several times to watch the content because at this point they made up 2third of the audience and the video only had 2900 views there were only 2100 unique viewers and of those 2100 1,400 of them were returning viewers so how do we use this information to actually get more views for our YouTube videos number one your returning viewers are people who come back to your channel a lot to watch your videos but something that's implied in the definition of a returning viewer is their satisfaction they're happy with the content and if your happiest viewers aren't happy with the content that you post then it's probably not going to perform well and if you want to know what I actually talked about in that video that made it so appealing to everyone then you can go check it out on YouTube right now or you can go watch this next video is going to talk about something that a lot of creators are getting wrong and it's the number one reason why most people are not watching their videos they're not getting views no one likes their content because they're not doing this one thing if you got value out of the video hit the like button and subscribe to the channel and it's always have a great day and I'll see you in the next video