Massive Decline in Analytics/Recommendations/Clicks

[BillSanDiego]

Hi everybody,

I'm a YouTuber from San Diego targeting the German audience.

I am experiencing a huge drop in analytics — going down from 3K-4K clicks a day to 1K all in a sudden.

I found out that YouTube stopped recommending my videos. Anyone experiencing a similar problem?

What I did:

• changed all thumbnails (they had a red stroke around it -- thought YT might think it's spammy)
• Updated my hero image on the channel home page
• Checkmarked "not for kids" on all videos
• Removed amazon links from my description (I had some amazon partner links to the equipment I use)

Should I start deleting videos that might be the cause of it -- I have a video talking about gun laws between Germany and USA -- could that be the cause?

What else can I do? Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Bill

 

[Gaijillionaire]

Things go up and down all the time. At this level it’s out of your control. Youtube will just do what it wants

 

[Want Answer!]

Why The Views Dropped As Seen In Screenshot!!

 

[KatyAdelson]

Hi @Want Answer!
I've merged your thread to this one that is discussing a similar topic.

Perhaps there was another algorithm shift recently?

 

[Min/Max Munchking]

Check the CTR before and after you changed your thumbnails. If there's a drop in CTR, that might be one of the potential reasons why YT stopped recommending you. Other than that, it's probably another algorithm change and you got the short end of the stick :/

 

[Want Answer!]

Check the CTR before and after you changed your thumbnails. If there's a drop in CTR, that might be one of the potential reasons why YT stopped recommending you. Other than that, it's probably another algorithm change and you got the short end of the stick :/

I changed the Thumbnail of the video. then views increased massively as seen in screenshot. 2 weeks later, views vanished!
so I must change thumbnail again so it increase? is it possible people report the video! while it has 550 Likes, 50 Dislikes!

 

[Min/Max Munchking]

I changed the Thumbnail of the video. then views increased massively as seen in screenshot. 2 weeks later, views vanished!
so I must change thumbnail again so it increase? is it possible people report the video! while it has 550 Likes, 50 Dislikes!

I don't know mate, you're asking questions which nobody here can possibly give you answers for - we don't know the age of your channel, how many videos you have, how often you upload, length of your videos, your CTR, average watch times, like/dislike ratios, number of comments on videos and all other relevant channel's statistics and hundreds of other factors none of us even know about. See, I assumed you had stable 3-4k views per day based on your OP, but now in your subsequent reply, you revealed it was a recent development resulting from the changes. So, I guess the traffic both increased & decreased AFTER the changes, or was the increase BEFORE you made changes that seemingly decreased the traffic?

Even if you list everything here, we can only guess - every channel is different because we all operate in different niches.

Whenever you change the thumbnail and other things in your videos, you're affecting the CTR. Now, you might get a higher CTR, but you also might get a lower one - I can't and don't know that. Not a single one of my 78 videos has the exact same CTRs - some of them are at around 12% while others barely break 5%. Also, not every traffic source responds equally to thumbnails - I usually have higher CTRs from YT search than from Homepage/Recommended. This indirectly affects average watch times as well and all other stats important for YT algorithm.

As a rule of thumb, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so whatever worked for you before making the changes, chances are reverting back to that could fix the problem. If it doesn't, I guess you're just another collateral victim of an ever-changing YT algorithm.

 

[BillSanDiego]

Thanks guys. CTR, Retention Rate, Engagement rate are all superb. It makes absolutely no sense to me what's happening. However, I suspect that the analytics and subscription bug (see ) http://yttalk.com/threads/subscriber-count-going-down.293530) might have affected the channel's rank and trust. Could that be? Since Google is not able to show historic data at the moment, could it that the YouTube algorithm ranks down the channel? See attached image. Since there is no historic data available, YouTube thinks my channel has no history? What do you think?