DO YOUTUBE TITLES MATTER FOR AUTOMOTIVE CONTENT?
One of our auto YouTube videos completely stalled, someone should have told us our titles suck.
So we’ve been creating and uploading more automotive video content to our small YouTube Channel, It’s All About The Build. We wanted to know why some of our videos were performing badly, so we started studying our channel performance.
YouTube is great because they have tons of tools that provide detailed analytics on how your channel and/or specific video performs over time.
During research on YouTube Analytics, we discovered our videos needed work. Let’s review.
We’d previously posted a video on how to tune a carburetor on our 1982 Chevy El Camino, but the video wasn't getting any views at all. It was stuck at around 50 total views since published and 50 days had passed.
I was starting to worry if our content was really that terrible. So I started digging into the YouTube video analytics engagement section, specifically the average view time of the video.
Here's a snapshot of the video analytics audience retention which displays the average view duration in minutes and the average percentage viewed:
Automotive YouTube Channel Audience Retention
To my surprise, some viewers watched the entire video. At 1 minute, 60% of viewers were still watching and an average of 43% of viewers watched till the end. Perhaps our content wasn't that bad after all. Now let’s take a look at the views by video over time.
Automotive YouTube Channel Views by Video
As you can see from day zero till day 50 the video had very few views, around no more than 50 views or so. The views were not increasing at all during the initial 50 days even with decent audience retention. However, after day 50 there's an increase in engagement over time and that's after a change we made...
ANALYZING YOUTUBE SEARCH TERMS
So why were the views so low even if people watched most of the video? Perhaps my video wasn’t showing up in YouTube “El Camino…” search results.
So I opened up an incognito window in Chrome and searched for 1982 El Camino videos. To my surprise, most of the content for the keyword “El Camino” was for the Breaking Bad - El Camino movie.
Initially, the video was titled “El Camino - Carburetor Check”. Then I searched on more specific titles such as “1982 El Camino” or “1982 G-Body El Camino” and those keywords did show 1982 El Camino car content, but not ours. Perhaps I needed a more descriptive title.
So I decided to rename my video title to “1982 Chevy El Camino G-Body - Carburetor Idle Check and Test Drive”
After the title change views started to slowly climb the very next day. This is what made the change in the graph on number of views since published after around day 50.
Here’s the big kicker… after we started stacking more views, we also gained longer and more consistent average view duration. This means that the video hit the right target audience. Here are the average view duration changes over time:
Average view duration over time
The only thing I didn’t like was the first 15 seconds show a 40% drop in viewers. That could be because the video starts with talking head. I tend to find that videos starting with talking head see a drop in the beginning verses starting off with b-roll teaser.
There are ways to also fix this type of issue after you’ve already posted your video, but we’ll save that for another day.
HELPFUL YOUTUBE TOOLS
Another helpful tool that can show which keywords your video is currently ranking for is Tube Buddy. The free version shows tag keyword rankings for you which will be a very similar audience that watches your content.
You can find this info within the analytics section of your YouTube video once installed as a plugin within your browser. Here’s what it looks like in the tags section:
YouTube tag rankings via Tube Buddy
Our video ranks quite well for specific tagged keywords that are part of our title and description. There could be a number of reasons why I don’t rank for some other tagged keywords, but YouTube analytics and Tube Buddy can help you find ways to optimize your title based on what your video is about.
CONCLUSION
There you have it. YouTube video titles DO matter, especially for automotive content.
For better view performance remember to:
Make sure your title is descriptive and matches the content delivered. If a viewer starts watching the video and leaves, YouTube will drop the search rank for your video.
Check your watch time duration, viewer interaction, and number of views over 30 days. These factors play a significant role in how YouTube decides to rank your automotive car content videos. You can make slight changes to the title and thumbnail which can make a huge difference.
Last but not least, the most important aspect is viewers have to find your content, message, or story interesting and RELEVANT TO THEM.
If you hit the mark, then you’ll have a greater chance of getting more views and growing your target audience.
