Rising Creators Forum

One of my videos has been live for 3 days and it's getting way fewer views than expected. the CTR is only 2.1% which i know is pretty bad

I'm thinking about changing the title to make it more clickable but I've heard mixed things about whether you should change titles after posting. some people say it confuses the algorithm and some say it's fine

Has anyone had success changing their title after a video is already published? or does it hurt the video's performance?

Unpopular opinion but i think constantly changing titles is a mistake. it makes your analytics messy and sometimes a video just needs time to find its audience

I had a video that had 2% CTR for the first week, i almost changed the title but decided to wait. three weeks later it randomly got picked up by the algorithm and now has 4.5% CTR and 80k views with the original title

not every video pops off immediately. youtube is still figuring out who to show it to in those first few days. If you keep changing the title you're essentially resetting that learning process

i'd say only change the title if after a week your CTR is still below 3% AND your impressions have basically stopped. if you're still getting impressions but low CTR, then yeah the title probably needs work

but give it at least 5-7 days before making changes

I change titles all the time and it saves multiple videos for me. if your CTR is that low after a few days, you definitely should try a different title

youtube doesn't penalize you for changing titles. In fact they expect creators to optimize their content. i've had videos go from 1.8% CTR to 5.3% CTR just from a title change and then youtube started promoting it more

wait at least 24-48 hours before changing though so you have enough data to know if it's actually a problem. and only change the title, don't change title AND thumbnail at the same time or you won't know which change made the difference

make the new title more curiosity-driven or benefit-focused. Instead of "how to edit videos" try "i edited 1000 videos - here's what i learned" or something that creates curiosity

track the CTR for another 24 hours after changing and if it doesn't improve, change it again. sometimes it takes 2-3 iterations to find what works