I recently did an experiment on the clickthrough-rate of different iPhone SE thumbnails with some surprising results, and thought that it’d be interesting to share. The respondents were shown 3 thumbnails and asked:
Which video would you watch?
I ran the same survey twice:
I’ve tried to summarise my key takeaways:
- The human element is extremely powerful. Thumbnails with a human element whether that be a face or hand outperformed those without
- Clarity is extremely powerful. The two top performing thumbnails had “iPhone SE” or “SE” within the thumbnail. While it may be tempting to go for a “minimal” aesthetic, you run the risk of lower CTR.
- When comparing thumbnails 3 and 5, the key difference seems to be that 5 has a knife held against the phone. As expected, being attention-grabbing in your thumbnail pays off. However, this needs to be carefully managed as you don’t want to produce clickbait thumbnails that end up damaging your AVD.
What takeaways did I miss?
Was your initial thumbnail choice correct?
I’m hoping to do more of these thumbnail studies, let me know what I should look into next!
Thumblytics is a service to help YouTubers test thumbnails BEFORE publishing. To learn more about why testing BEFORE you publish is extremely powerful click here.
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