The Science of Thumbnailing for Brands
It's about finding Thumbnail - Branding - Fit & it involves spreadsheet rather than design skills
Welcome back. I’m George, Founder/Producer at Orama!
There are a lot of thumbnail guides. The problem is they are made for Creators, not Brands. They tell you how to create better thumbnails, they usually mention Mr Beast’s channel (250M subscribers) with its team of thumbnail specialists, who create and test thumbnails before the video production starts and optimize them endlessly. They are masterpieces, but they are not a useful reference.
There’s an official guide from YouTube/Google, with the following recommendations:
Reviewing your thumbnails to see if they bring out the best of the video. Also, make sure that you follow our thumbnail policy.
Taking pictures during your shoot so that you have several options for thumbnails when you upload your video.
Thinking about who may watch your video and where they may find it to choose between a searchable or intriguing title.
After posting your video, don't forget to look at your metrics in YouTube Analytics to understand the impact of your thumbnails and titles.
It's not that helpful.
Below I will outline a more practical approach, with Brands - not Creators in mind. At Orama, we apply this process to our clients' videos and our own.
But first, why it’s important.
Thumbnails matter beyond YouTube
I will use data from YouTube, and examples from YouTube, because that’s where you can find the most information but even if you’re not on YouTube: thumbnails matter! They are in blog posts, podcast episodes, embedded links, etc.
When deciding on consuming content online, your audience has to judge the book by its cover, or the video by its thumbnail - without reviews and external recommendations.
Thumbnails are the best ratio of Time Spent / Result. It takes much less time to tweak a thumbnail or change the title than to improve the content, that’s true for MrBeast and your brand. You need to keep the effort proportional. MrBeast spends thousands on thumbnails because he spends hundreds of thousands (or is it millions) on videos.
The Lean approach to thumbnails
In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries outlines a process for creating successful startups. He advocates through a quasi-scientific process and introduces the concept of MVP (Minimum Viable Product). The MVP is defined by the founders’ perspective: a minimum version of their product that allows them to learn what works.
The thumbnail click-through rate (CTR) is an indication of what works in terms of content.
But it also has a long-term impact: the combination of CTR & total watch time is the best predictor of long-term success.
And you can have a quasi-scientific, Lean approach, to creating thumbnails. The clue is in the last point from the YouTube recommendation
After posting your video, don't forget to look at your metrics in YouTube Analytics to understand the impact of your thumbnails and titles.
YouTube and other platforms don’t penalize you for re-uploading a new thumbnail, so you can iterate, and learn what works for your brand. I call it finding thumbnail-branding-fit.
But … you will not be making thumbnails in the style of MrBeast or other popular Creators, even if you are a humorous B2B brand - because the thumbnail also involves a level of branding.
What’s a good brand thumbnail?
It’s one that generates consistently strong CTRs, while being on brand and without being clickbait.
Next question: what’s a good CTR? It will depend a lot on your industry, the level of competition, the type of content, etc.
It’s handy that I have two channels, both related to investing, but with very different CTRs. One is a podcast, with a CTR of around 3%, these are mainly 30-minute-long conversations.
The other includes shorter analyses inspired by movies and series and the CTR is around 7%.
Anatomy of a brand thumbnail (podcast example)
I talk about thumbnails but it’s always a combination of Title & Thumbnail image.
The style of the thumbnail will vary by type of content. I’ll take the example of a brand conversational podcast as there are many elements you could include somewhere, these include:
Profile picture of the guest
Profile picture of the host
Title/info about the host
Title/info about the guest (title)
Brand (the one behind the podcast)
Podcast brand
Background picture
Title/info about the podcast
There are no rules, but the most frequent issues I observe are:
Too much branding
Too much text
Ignoring safe zones:
So it’s about finding thumbnail- branding-fit, but there’s an additional constraint: the amount of effort and time you spend on this.
You need to optimize the trilemma:
CTR
Branding
Effort
The process for Thumbnail-Branding-Fit through data-driven iteration
NB: I use big words because they make you look smart (I think)
Here’s how we do it:
Login to YouTube > go to Analytics > Advanced Mode (top right corner) > Download the stats.
Select a benchmark for CTRs: I’ll use 1.5% for my podcast channel (for the other one it would be 5%). Anything above that I won’t touch.
Filter the videos based on watch time to focus on the ones with the most potential. I get this:
And then I do a manual filter: which videos are still relevant? Is the content worth it? And select which ones need to be tweaked.
This is a process that we do bi-monthly.
I also monitor closely the CTR right after an important video (like a full episode) is uploaded as you get immediate feedback. Sometimes your thumbnail idea just doesn’t click. If the CTR is very low, we change it immediately BEFORE sharing the video on Linkedin and elsewhere.
If you wonder how it looks with the example above (red line in the spreadsheet)? It’s an episode with the author of The Bogle Effect. One of the “rules” is to use the title for SEO and to try to sell the story in the thumbnail.
Neither is a MrBeast-style masterpiece. But if we get a CTR of 2% instead of 1.48% it’s a winner. Is it going to work? Not sure but we can keep iterating.
Takeaways
Review your content stats regularly and use them to modify thumbnails
Set up rules & branding guidelines as building blocks
Based on 1 and 3 build templates - but keep iterating
Set up a benchmark for CTR and go back to 1
Hope this is helpful. If designing thumbnails is not for you, it’s included in some of our editing packages - don’t hesitate to get in touch.