How do you get your videos recommended by YouTube, so they get pushed out to more people resulting in more views and subscribers?

In the video below you’ll learn how YouTube Recommendation System works, how to view and understand the traffic sources for recommended videos, tips and tricks to get more of your videos recommended by YouTube and frequently ask questions about recommended videos.

CLICK HERE TO GET MY VIDEO COURSE:
How To Get 1000 Engaged YouTube Subscribers Quickly & Easily

What is one thing you really wish that creators understood about how the recommendation system works?

YouTube: I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that the recommendation system is for each viewer trying to help that viewer find the videos that will be most satisfied to that viewer. The only way to do this on YouTube with billions of videos is via personalization.

If you’ve been watching a lot of cat videos recently on YouTube, you’ll notice that YouTube serves more cat videos on the YouTube homepage and in suggestive videos, which are the videos on the right side of the watch pages. These are all recommended based upon your personal browsing behavior.

YouTube: You must keep in mind that everything about YouTube is personalized. YouTube is a collection of millions of niches and even the largest channel on YouTube has a very small audience relative to the overall size of YouTube. Only a fraction of a percent of viewers on YouTube watch even the largest channels. Really it’s about finding your particular audience.

YouTube’s recommendation system is constantly learning, evolving every day from over 80 billion pieces of information they call signals. Similar in signals they consider are clicks, watch time, survey responses, sharing, likes, dislikes, personal activity signals, and contact signals. Where does YouTube recommend your YouTube videos? Your recommended videos appear in browse features and suggested videos, which you can see in YouTube analytics.

Browse features refers to traffic that comes from the homepage, home screen, youtube.com, or on the YouTube App.

Suggested views come from suggestions appearing alongside other videos or the videos that come up next. Keep in mind that recommendations drive the most traffic on YouTube, even more than channel subscriptions or search. It makes sense to focus on recommendations if you want to grow your channel fast. The videos that appear on the home screen are the most relevant, personalized recommendations for each viewer.

Speaker 4: In analytics specifically home is also called browse. Browse as a verb, really means somebody looking through either a set of information or in this case a set of videos without a specific intent about what they want. That’s actually very similar to how viewers behave on home when they arrive at that destination.

Maybe they come there and they’re a casual viewer, they’re not quite sure with what they want to watch. I think that matches our recommendations on that surface too, where we have a really diverse set of options. It’s videos from your past watch history, it’s videos from channels you subscribe to, it’s videos from new viewers, and videos that were popular with similar audiences.

Speaker 1: The recommended videos that you see on the home screen are going to be different than somebody else’s because they’re personalized. It’s also a great way for your videos to be discovered by non-subscribers. When a viewer visits their home screen, YouTube will display videos from their subscriptions, videos watched by similar viewers, and new videos.

The two factors that the selection of videos is based upon is one, performance and two, search and watch history.

Performance refers to how well the video has engaged and satisfied similar viewers.
Search and watch history refers to how often a viewer has watched a specific channel or topic.

It also refers to how often each video is shown to the viewer. Keep in mind that subscribers watch more videos from subscriptions that come from the home screen than they do from their subscriptions feed.

Here are some tips on how to get your videos recommended on the home screen.

• Try to keep your viewers engaged for longer and keep them coming back to watch more of your content. Whether it’s a long video or several short ones, you want to keep people watching longer, so YouTube will surface more of your content to other people.
  
• Keep doing what works. When you discover a video, that’s getting a lot more traffic than your previous videos make more of those types of videos because YouTube will service more of videos that people like.

If you click on the Reach tab and YouTube studio for a specific video and notice a lot of traffic that’s coming from browse and suggested that means your video is being recommended by YouTube. Make a similar video and link it to that high-performing video, so you get more recommended traffic. You can also click on the Engagement tab and YouTube studio and study your audience retention graph. A spike in a graph refers to high engagement. Whereas a dip in the graph means that people are leaving or losing interest in the video.

The solution is to improve the engagement on the next video you upload, so you get a longer watch time and a higher probability that your video will be recommended by YouTube.

Suggested videos are personalized to the viewer based upon their prior activity or what they may be interested in watching next. They’re shown to viewers on the right side of the watch page under up next below the video in the mobile App and as a next video in autoplay. Here are some of the signals that trigger suggestive views.

Videos that viewers watch along with a current video or are topically related. These can be from the same to channel or from different channels, videos from a viewer’s past watch history, so if they’ve watched a lot of cat videos, they’ll be served more cat videos.

Here are some tips to get more suggested views from YouTube.

• Develop a series of videos that are organically connected to each other, so a viewer will binge-watch multiple videos in a row.
  
• Use playlists links, cards, and end screens to suggest the next video to watch. Usually, I’ll tell people what video or playlist to watch next and link to it in the end screen. You can also add that video or playlist in the description and also pin it to the top of your comments.
  
• Double down on videos that are performing well on your channel. If you notice a video, it’s getting a lot of traffic in the first 24 to 48 hours, double down that video by creating a similar video. Link the two videos together and a playlist, so viewers can take a deeper dive into your content and be motivated to subscribe to your channel.
  
  For example, if you click on the reach tab and YouTube analytics, then under traffic sources, click see more. Now see all the suggested video topics that are bringing in the most traffic to your channel. Make more videos based upon the suggested video topics that are getting a lot of traffic. This will help more of your videos getting suggested traffic, which is free promotion by YouTube.

Speaker 2: How long does it take on average for a video to be picked up by the recommendation algorithm?

Speaker 3: Ideally, it would happen immediately. However, it’s not just about getting new videos into the pool of recommendation candidates. The most important thing is also trying to figure out which viewers would be interested in these videos. That’s something that’s especially hard for new videos because we just don’t have as much information about them.

Speaker 1: Design your video around people that are interested in your content. Think about who’s watching your channel and what they’re interested in. If you’re in it for the long-term also think about how their interest will change over six months, a year, or two years in the future.

There’s 2 things that you need to do for your channel to grow.

• Number one is to attract new viewers and number two is to keep those viewers coming back to watch more of your content. If you click on your audience tab and YouTube analytics, you’ll see returning viewers and new viewers. Ideally, you want your viewers returning to watch more of your content.

When you have a small channel, it’s harder to get your videos recommended by YouTube because they don’t have enough data yet to recommend your videos to other people. The best thing to do when you have a small channel is to focus on YouTube search so you can attract traffic from people that are searching for particular search terms.

If YouTube search is not working for you, watch this video titled YouTube search not working and how to fix it.

CLICK HERE TO GET MY VIDEO COURSE:
How To Get 1000 Engaged YouTube Subscribers Quickly & Easily