Rising Creators Forum

My click through rate is sitting at around 2.3% and from what I've read that's pretty bad. youtube studio keeps recommending i improve my thumbnails but i'm not really sure what i'm doing wrong

I use bright colors, clear text, and my face in most thumbnails. I thought that's what you're supposed to do but people still aren't clicking

What's your average CTR and what changes did you make that actually improved it? i feel like this is the main thing holding my channel back right now

Your CTR is suffering because your thumbnails probably look like everyone else's in your niche

go search for the topics you make videos about and look at the thumbnails that come up. if yours blend in with all the others, nobody will click. you need contrast and differentiation

I improved my CTR from 2.8% to 5.4% by doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing. Everyone in my niche used red and yellow thumbnails so I switched to blue and purple. everyone showed the end result so i showed the process instead. everyone used bold sans serif fonts so i used a different style

also make sure your title and thumbnail work together. the thumbnail should make people curious and the title should promise a payoff. don't repeat the same info in both

and honestly sometimes your content topic just isn't that interesting. you can have a perfect thumbnail but if the topic doesn't appeal to people they won't click. might need to rethink your video topics too

2.3% is definitely low. you want to be at 4% minimum, ideally 5-8% for good performance

I was at 2.5% CTR for months until I completely changed my thumbnail strategy. here's what worked:

1. I stopped putting my face in every thumbnail. turns out people don't care about seeing me, they care about the result or benefit
2. I made the text BIGGER. like way bigger than felt comfortable. If you can't read the text on a phone screen it's too small
3. I started using curiosity instead of being literal. instead of "how to edit faster" my thumbnail says "i cut editing time in half" with a shocked face
4. I simplified. went from trying to show multiple things in one thumbnail to showing ONE clear thing

The biggest change was testing different styles. make 3 different thumbnails for your next video and change it after a day or two if CTR is bad. you can update thumbnails after posting and sometimes that's what saves a video