PRO TIP: How To Know If A YouTube Thumbnail Is Good (2024)

We’re not here to bore you with:

• What is a thumbnail
• Tell you the best size for a thumbnail…
• Because you know all of this by now

This guide is what made by people like you, looking for real answers.

Related: How to make a Good Thumbnail.

How to Know if Your Thumbnail is Good

Answer: A/B Test your thumbnails to know if they’re any good.

This’ll help you understand your audience way easier than just guessing.

Why A/B Testing is so important:

• What it does: You can create multiple thumbnails and see which one gets a higher click-through rate (CTR) with data taken straight from your target audience.
• Tool: Thumbnail Test can help you test thumbnails and optimize your CTR.
• Analytics data: Look at your CTR, especially in the first 24 hours after publishing, for videos with high impressions. This tells you how effective a thumbnail was at grabbing attention.

Even Google recommends coming back in 24 hours here:

What Makes a Good Thumbnail

The greatest YouTube thumbnails grab attention and give a clear idea of what the video is about.

1. Eye-Catching Imagery: Use bright colors and high-contrast visuals.
2. Clarity: It should be easily understood at a small size.
3. Relevant: Match the image to your video content.
4. Text Overlays: Use minimal text to add context, but don’t overcrowd.
5. Faces: If relevant, showing expressive faces can boost engagement.
6. Branding: Consistent style or logo helps viewers recognize your content.
7. High Quality: Use sharp, high-resolution images.

A table’s going to make this easier to grasp:

Focus on making it stand out while keeping it relevant to your video’s content!

Conclusion

This guide just taught you that:

• The best way to know if a thumbnail is good is to A/B test it.
• And to do so, you may want to use Thumbnail Test

Why? Because YouTube doesn’t have this feature yet, so your best option is to use third-party tool.

Hope we’ve answered all of your questions!

Thank you for reading this,
Thumbnail Test