Impressions click-through rate

An impression is counted when YouTube shows your thumbnail on one of its own surfaces, so the figure ignores clicks arriving from embeds, external sites and other search engines. Two things trip people up. The first is comparison: click-through rate falls mechanically as a video reaches further beyond the people who already like your work, so a wide-reaching video on a low percentage can be doing far better than a narrow one on a high percentage. The second is that clicks alone settle nothing. A thumbnail that wins the click and loses the viewer thirty seconds later has cost you more than it earned.