EN 
PL 
DE 
ES 
How to get more views on YouTube before publishing anything
As a YouTube creator, you know that video thumbnails are an extremely important part of your content strategy. Depending on how your videos look, they can seriously affect the viewership of your videos - no matter how informative or entertaining they are.
As everyone tries to create the best thumbnails possible, it can sometimes be difficult to stand out in YouTube search results. If your thumbnails aren't colorful, eye-catching and easy to digest, you may get fewer views than your channel is capable of providing.
Therefore, every creator should have video preview tool for comparing thumbnails, and luckily we've developed one here at vidIQ. Watch our latest video on how to use this amazing tool below:
Our thumbnail preview tool has one goal, and that's to give your content the best chance of being discovered on YouTube. Here's how it works when you're ready to start collecting views.
How to use the video preview tool
To access our new thumbnail preview tool, follow these three important steps:
- Make sure vidIQ is installed.
- Upload the video to YouTube along with your preferred thumbnail.
- Look for the thumbnail preview tool on the right side of the YouTube workflow. It appears on the first upload page, as shown below:
Then type the search term you want to rank for, and click "Preview in search results'. You will immediately see a mock-up of your video along with the selected thumbnail, title and description. The thumbnail preview tool will then compare this mockup with the movies already ranking for the search term you entered.
Additional video preview features
The above process can help you get more views before you even publish your video. This is especially useful if you are competing for a specific search term on YouTube.
But what do you do when YouTube starts recommending your content to random viewers browsing the platform? How do you ensure that your thumbnails perform well in such a scenario?
Fortunately, we have a solution for this too.
The thumbnail preview tool has two options for displaying content: the home screen and the search screen. The home screen preview shows a more random selection of videos, just like you might encounter on your YouTube homepage. Viewing this screen helps you determine whether your video is likely to catch someone's attention when they are not on a viewing schedule.
To switch between search and home screen, go to the upper left corner of the preview tool and click one of the options, as shown below:
And here are some additional features that make life easier for developers....
After selecting the search tab, go to the top right corner of the preview page and click "Select the search term' This helps you quickly find the target search term on the screen, as shown below:
In home screen mode, go to the top right corner of the page and click "Compare with competitors'. When enabled, it shows random videos from channels in the vidIQ competitor list for additional thumbnail comparison. You can see what this feature looks like below:
On the other hand, when this feature is disabled, you will see random videos from your YouTube viewing history.
How to update YouTube thumbnails and more with the preview tool
If the preview tool suggests that the title, thumbnail and description are not working, you can change them. Simply go to "Your video data' on the right side of the preview page and edit/replace each resource as you see fit.
The video preview tool is available for testing for all vidIQ users, but you need vidIQ Boost to unlock full access. But of course, you can always start with vidIQ free downloadby testing our video preview tool and getting more views of your content today.
