One Tweak 20x’ed This Video’s Views
The Amplified Impact Podcast
December 9th, 2023
So I just ran an A B test on a YouTube video, and the results are mind-blowing! A B testing is like playing with ideas to see what clicks with your audience.
We made a small tweak to the title…changed “How to Unfuck Your Life” to “How to Reinvent Yourself”.
And bam, 20 times more views and 2.5 minutes longer watch time.
Surprising, right?
Titles aren’t just about clicks; they set the vibe for the entire video.
Lesson learned: First impressions matter.
So, if your content doesn’t explode right away, don’t stress. Keep experimenting. It’s all about the continuous improvement game.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“It’s a constant iterative process. So don’t give up on a piece of content just because it doesn’t take off right out the gate. Keep repurposing, keep tweaking the intros, the hooks, and see if you can’t get that thing to ignite.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
So we just finished an A B test on one of our videos on YouTube, and the results are kind of insane and I wanted to share them with you guys and some of the takeaways that we gathered from this. So, first of all, what is an A B test? A B testing is when you have a video title or a thumbnail or a landing page. It’s when you do a this or that type test where. Where maybe you have a landing page and you’re like, hey, let’s try this headline on this version of the page, and then let’s create another version of the page where it has maybe a slightly different headline. And then with all the traffic that comes to our website or comes to wherever, we’re going to direct half of it to this page, half to the other page. We’re going to see how each performs and then aggregate our data and then go from there. Whichever one has the better results, we end up going with that design. And this is a very, very powerful concept that is critical regardless of what you’re trying to create as an entrepreneur.
Anthony Vicino:
If you’re creating ads, if you’re creating product landing pages, if you’re creating different emails, like promotional emails that are going out, you should always be doing a B testing to figure out what’s working, what’s not working, because often we can fool ourselves into thinking we know exactly what’s going to be the most productive version of a thing. But the reality is you only ever know once you start collecting the data. And the data can show you some really compelling things. For instance, this video that we just finished the AB test on, we tested all, we changed. We made one tweak, just one tweak. And the result of that was it 20 x the video’s views. It 20 X’d the views. That’s a crazy amount for just one simple tweak.
Anthony Vicino:
Not only that, not only did it get more views, which is something that you would expect from this type of a change, but the other thing that it did was it increased the average view time of the video. So in version one, it was viewed, on average, five minutes and 55 seconds. The other video, the other version of it, was viewed nine minutes and 35 seconds. So that’s almost, what is that? Two and a half minutes more watch time just based off of one tweak. And I think the thing that’s craziest about this is what the tweak was. The tweak itself was a change to the title. We were a B testing. Is this title more attractive to the audience? Or is this title more attractive to the audience? Which one is most likely to get a click? And the thing about the title and thumbnail is that we often think the only reason that the only goal of a good title or thumbnail is to increase the click through rate or get more engagement.
Anthony Vicino:
Right. The title, the hook of our ad is just to get people to click on the thing, right? But we don’t necessarily attribute view watch time to the title. Like, why would title one have a watch time that’s two and a half minutes less than title two? That’s very, very interesting. Now, the reason for that is because the title and the thumbnail create a first impression. And that first impression impacts everything that you encounter after that. Think about being at a party. It’s the first time that you meet a person is they’re just being a dick to the server. You now think that person’s a dick, and that’s going to color every future interaction that you have with that person.
Anthony Vicino:
You’re probably going to see everything that they do from that point on through the lens of them being a jerk. You’re not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. So even in situations where there may be pure intent and they’re not doing anything wrong, you still have this veil of like, that guy’s a dick, right? It affects everything that comes after. And so first impressions are critically, critically important, as we see in this example of the A B test, where the titles were very, very different and they led to different click through rates. Different outcomes there, but massively different outcomes on view time. Now, the video in question was title one was how to unfuck your life, and title two was how to reinvent yourself. Or here’s how to reinvent yourself. So very, very different.
Anthony Vicino:
And it’s interesting, it’s not surprising that one might turn off an audience, right, when you start swearing in a title that can turn people off. But you would think that people clicking on that title with the swear would not be put off by that idea within the context of the video. So why is it that the second title had such longer view duration than the first title? It’s interesting. The only way that we could have predicted this, there’s no way we could have predicted this, but the only way we can know that this is, in fact, what was happening was by doing the A B testing. And so a lot of times when we create something, we think we’ve done all we can. You’ve created it. Now it’s time to publish it and turn it over to the algorithm gods. And it’s going to be what it’s going to be.
Anthony Vicino:
But the truth is you actually have a lot of control still, like the work is not done the moment you hit publish. You still have a lot of ability on a lot of the social media platforms, on ad platforms to be doing this variable testing. If it’s on your own website and you’ve created the landing page, it’s never done. You’re constantly tweaking, improving, and looking for opportunities to make it more effective. And so the work has only just begun the moment you hit publish. And I want to share that with you because there’s a lot of content sometimes that you think maybe it just sucks. Like you might have created this great piece of content. At first you thought it was great, but then it didn’t get any engagement, didn’t get any visibility.
Anthony Vicino:
So you think, well, people must not like this. I’ve had that happen countless times and what I do is I go back to content that I think is better than the impressions and the engagement would indicate. And I’ll tweak the hook, I’ll tweak the intro over and over and over, and I’ll try 1015 different times. And without fail, I can almost always get that one piece of content to eventually go viral if I just land on the right hook. And that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the second try, it’s not the third try. Sometimes it’s the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th try. So that’s what I’m saying. When you put out this content, it’s not just put it out there, push publish, and then be done with it.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s a constant iterative process. So don’t give up on a piece of content just because it doesn’t take off right out the gate. Keep repurposing, keep tweaking the intros, the hooks, and see if you can’t get that thing to ignite. And that’s all I got. So I just wanted to share that with you guys because it’s pretty interesting result and hope that brings you guys some insight, a little bit of clarity into what we’re doing. If you ever see our videos on YouTube, the thumbnails, titles changing, that’s what we’re doing. We’re experimenting, we’re making a hypothesis, we’re testing it, then we’re iterating, trying to improve. So hope this brings you guys some value.
Anthony Vicino:
I’ll catch you guys in the next video, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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