The thing most YouTubers overlook that drives massive views towards your YouTube video is getting your video in Google search results with right SEO targeting. We recently had a great example of one of our clients of TUBEup - Feel the Breeze family
At the moment from publishing the video below the channel had 28k subscribers and an average of views on their latest videos variating between 20k and 45k in a week. But this video got over 100k views in just two days.
Click bait title or SEO targeting?
At first sight you might think the views were driving by the title & thumbnail, which some would consider being a little clickbait (one or two comments of more than 300 suggest also so). But the analytics tell a totally different story and show these views where primarily driving by SEO targeting.
And if you work with us you know we drive and manage channels by data, not by emotion of a few subscribers. It is easy to get lost in the specific views of a few that articulate theirs clearly (especially the negative ones) and overlook what the actual data shows.
But first to fully understand the succes of this video it is important to know how Google drives views to your videos on your channel.
How does Google drive views to a YouTube video
With certain Google search terms, Google shows relevant YouTube videos at the top of the search results. For example if you search for 'boat life' in google you get these results.
As you can see before the actual results from webpages Google shows YouTube videos. These YouTube video's will drive views towards your channel from outside of YouTube.
It is still not totally clear how the algorithm of Google works and why with some search terms it shows YouTube video's and with others not. But what we do know is that with existing videos in specific search results like: 'boat life', 'tiny house building', 'best investments of 2022', you have a chance to get your YouTube video listed there as these search results are already showing YouTube videos.
And sometimes your video get's listed as the first video with a certain search terms.
And how this works, Google's algorithm searches several times a day for new videos on YouTube - based primarily on title, description and first comment (the primarily SEO elements), and takes over the SEO and puts them into the search results of Google.
Afterwards the algorithm keeps track if the video is a good fit for the search term by analysing how long the people keep looking at the suggested video. YouTube and Google exchange data.
And based on the data from YouTube, Google keeps or deletes your video in the search results.
And if you are wondering how big the impact can be, well let's see and take a deep dive in the analytics of the video of the Feel the Breeze family.
YouTube video analytics
The first thing we look at with a video is how it is performing in the first 3 hours:
how many views
the CTR (Click Through Rate, read more in this blog post), and
WTR (change thumbnail or title if necessary)
The first three hours, the video was performing good, not as the best video from the channel, but definitely above average.
And then after two days we noticed something strange, the views increased drastically, CTR stayed the same but WTR (watch time retention, how long people kept watching the video) dropped drastically.
These are always red alerts, as this could indicate a click bait title & thumbnail which are bad for your channel and impacts the results of the upcoming videos (the performance of your previous video determines the performance of your next video in the first 30 minutes, which influence the overal performance of the YouTube video).
So if you see figures like below on your dashboard in YouTube studio - no need for panic - but you do need to take a look at your analytics to see what is going on.
From experience we know where to look and the first thing is, understanding where the views are coming from. Because if these figures are driven by YouTube search results, than there is something wrong.
But to be honest - views would not sky rocket like this within YouTube if CTR is this high and WTR is this low. So this indicates that probably the views are coming outside of YouTube.
And why do we know this?
YouTube has one goal, keeping the viewers as long as possible on their platform. Which means she pushes videos with high CTR and WTR. And definelty not a video that has a high CTR but low WTR (to fully understand this we recommend you to follow our online course about YouTube SEO),
Main traffic source views video - Google search
Out of the analytics we see that 61,3% of the views (after 6 days - first 3 days this was above 80%) of this YouTube video are from an external source. We also see that there is a strong growth in just a short time frame.
Looking at this data we know that the video is probably pushed by Google search for a short time in a search term that doesn't fit the content of the video (which explains the drastic drop of WTR).
Below you can see that indeed the extra push was from external source - Google search.
After searching several combinations from the title in Google, the video was pushed on three google search terms that we could find for a couple of hours:
Downside of an alternative lifestyle
Fight on sailing yacht
Sailing life
Unfortunately YouTube doesn't show the exact search results within Google anymore. This means you have to do some research by yourself to understand where the views are exactly coming from within Google Search.
Impact YouTube video in Google search results
As you can see, getting your video in Google search results can boost your YouTube rankings significantly, this will lead to more views, more subscribers and more income. It could even be a potential going viral video and massive break-through for your channel.
This video would have done better if the google search term results would have better matched the content of the video.
Click bait or SEO targeting
If we take the results of Google search out of the data, we still see quite a high number of views compared to the subscribers amount. Looking at the other data like:
views vs likes
likes vs dislikes compared to amount of views
subscribers gained vs lost
WTR within YouTube search
WTR within home & suggested
We clearly see that people are enjoying this video, liking the content, interacting in a positive way and the channel is gaining more subscribers. This clearly means that the video does not have a click bait title or thumbnail for her audience - but definitely one that stands out and triggers the viewer.
To see the full analytics on click bait or not, join our newsletter and get notified when our next blog post comes out. Then we will show you the underlying data and the conclusions.
PS: we still have an amazing offer on our 'old' SEO course. We will be rebranding this one and the price will go up. So grab your discount of x% here.
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