How effective of an influencer are you?

Behold, the majestic annotation click through rate (‘CTR’). The very epitome of influencer success. 

Perhaps the most important of metrics by which a brand will measure your campaign, the annotation CTR measures just how many people visit their site after watching your video. Needless to say, your goal as an influencer is to get this number as high as possible. It shows how much of an IMPACT you made.

But how? What is the elixir of annotation CTR success?

Use annotations wisely

While your instinct may be to incessantly hammer your audience with annotations, that’s only likely to increase your shut down rate. You need to strike a subtle balance between piquing interest and irritating viewers.

The oracles at TubeFilter maintain that annotations:

“Should be used solely when they don’t interfere with audience’s enjoyment of the content... Get out of the viewers way.... If we have to distract them with shiny objects and annotations midway through our content in order to get them to watch more of it, we need to make better content, not make more or better annotations.”

Be bold

As the team at YouTube Foundation rightly point out, if no one notices your annotation, they certainly won’t be clicking on it. So, in the most inoffensive way possible, you need your annotation to stand out with movement and colour – think blue, red and green. However, given YouTube limits the text colours you can use, you may need to make a graphic first with your own video editing software. Just don’t make it so jazzy that people can’t read it.

Catch them while you can

We hope you’re sitting down for this. Because we live in a world crippled by short attention spans, apparently some viewers don’t watch your videos all the way to the end. We’re sorry. Hence why to be effective you need to catch their attention!

YouTube, Amir Jaffari of Doctor Mad Science discovered this was having an effect on his CTR, so devised a strategy to lure customers to his website before skipping to Justin Timberlake’s latest video (FYI it’s amazing). Thankfully, he kindly shared his findings with the YouMoz community. The method goes a little something like this:

• Check your 28-day analytics views reports; 
• Find your most popular video; 
• Select that video on the Audience Retention tab of your analytics dashboard; 
• Find the drop­off point (that sad time when you start losing views at an increasingly faster rate); 
• Add an annotation to your video 20 seconds before the drop-off point; 
• Make the annotation as large as you can without distracting from the main content; 
• Position this in the lower right corner of the screen for approximately 40% more clicks; 
• Write a brief (we’re talking 1-5 word) call to action which relates to the current video – for instance if you’ve just uploaded the coolest cat video ever, ‘more cat madness here’ will suffice. 

Apparently Doctor Mad Science increased his CTR by 22,400% using this formula. Interestingly though, his tips on placement and timing fly in the face of YouTube’s advice!

So if you’ve done some experimenting yourself, let us know if the numbers add up for you.

Also, if you like what you've read, check out our blog on ' How to get more views on YouTube'.

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