YouTube Thumbnail A/B Test Results

Intermediate

About this Tutorial

Find out the results of YouTube Thumbnail A/B Tests with this YouTube Thumbnail Image hack we can do in Google Sheets.

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Featured Formulas

CONCATENATE() IF() IMAGE() INDEX() ISBLANK() SPLIT()

Video Transcript

<div>0:00  I cracked the code, I figured out how to find the A.B. Test results for YouTuber's thumbnails. I'm gonna reveal that in this video and show you a few Google Sheet tricks along the way to make this a little bit better than what I have already, but what, what do we have? 0:16 So we put in a URL of a YouTube video, literally any YouTube video and I've chosen rather recent within the last month of the top YouTubers, so they have A.B. 0:29 Test thumbnails, and then what I do is I Thanks for watching!

Get the ID, then we add a, add that ID to a custom max res default sort of logo not logo, thumbnail URL that I discovered, and then we just change one or two like literally the number one or number two, and we get 0:49 AB. But we also get out of this the actual thumbnail. So, we're using index , we're using split , we're using image here. 0:59 Let me show you how this all works, and we'll do it with the very first one, and then we're gonna add one extra thing to this to make it even better. 1:07 Alright, so we're gonna do equals, and the main thing here is image .

The image function or formula here is really powerful. 1:14 You can take any URL that exists online that is available to the public. So, this doesn't work for Google Drive. 1:22 URLs, anything that the URL actually changes and gets obfuscated, but basically any URL that exists online, any image , you can do Twitter bio profiles you can do LinkedIn, LinkedIn profiles, YouTube, thumbnails, YouTube profile images, all types of stuff. 1:40 And what we can do here is literally just take the URL of the of the YouTube video.

We're gonna need to grab this stuff after the equal sign. 1:52 So this is what there's at the end of a URL of a YouTube video. It's youtube.com slash watch, then a question mark, then a V equals, and that V equals means the video ID is equal to, and then it gives us this video ID. 2:07 We're gonna need this video ID. So how do we get that? We're gonna use split . We're gonna use split , and we're gonna split around in quotations the equal sign. 2:16 Okay? And what we get out of that, actually I will show you what we get out of that. We get a reference error . 2:24 It's okay.

See we now get two things, two things, two cells , one with just the watch, question mark, V, and then we get the, the ID that we need. 2:37 So we need the second thing here. Okay? So what we need to do at the beginning of split , we need to wrap around this index . 2:45 Index is one of those really simple formulas that ends up being extremely useful, so useful.

So we're going to reference the result of this split . 2:55 And at the end of it, we want the first row because we saw they were on a, the two results were on a single row, about two different columns. 3:04 And then we're going to do comma two and we're going to get that second column. Okay, and now we get just the ID. 3:10 So now we need to wrap this ID with the URL. Of every single YouTube video has a, has a thumbnail URL and it uses this index . 3:23 Sorry, it uses this ID.

So we're going to do, what we could do here is like concatenate and actually I'm going to do that. 3:30 Right now we're going to use concatenate . We're going to put in quotes this first part which is img.youtube.com slash vi slash then we're going to need the, you are the ID of that video. 3:43 Okay, right now we only get this. What we need to end it with is slash maxresdefault.jpg. Okay, right at the end we can do another, with concatenate we're going to do a comma and then in quotes slash maxresdefault.jpg and keep that in quotes. 4:01 So now we have a URL.

Of the image , and it's the image of every single YouTube video, has this maxresdefault. 4:09 There's other ones called like hqdefault and there's other, other things and we'll, and I'll show you the other things which is important to the A-B test. 4:18 So this really cool thing right now which is, we're gonna wrap this with image . So wrap that with image , and we get the actual thumbnail of this URL. 4:30 Okay, what we wanna do is take all of this, this entire thing we did, we did image , concat , concatenate, index, split. 4:37 We're gonna just paste it here into this A category.

And look, it's gonna look exactly the same until we change this last part of the URL from max-res-default to max-res-default underscore custom. 4:52 And now we get the custom one, the A of the A-B test. For the second for the B one, we're gonna take the entire thing again, paste it here, and instead of custom one, custom two. 5:05 So now we have A-B testing, and we get the actual thumbnail that exists right now.

So we get the result of the A-B test. 5:14 Okay, and I promised to you at the end of this video, I would show you one thing to make this exact sheet even better. 5:19 So as we go down, we see that like we can enter more and more URLs and sometimes they're not A-B testing. 5:28 Like actually, let me show you, I'll use my own, I have youtube.com slash better sheets.

Let's go here to my own, and I'm going to show you that not all of them have a have a A-B test. 5:45 So we're going to paste that here, take all of this, paste it again, press the wrong button, take all of this, paste it again, and you'll see See you next time!

There is no A-B test, there is nothing to show here, the images are blank here, blank blank. 6:01 Some videos, especially more than one month old, I'm shooting this on October 10th, a month ago, this didn't exist, and so these are very recent videos and not all of them are using the A-B test. 6:16 Even top channels like T-Series aren't doing this yet, so at least I found 3 channels that did this, Mark Rober, well 4 channels, Colin Samir, Ryan Trahan, and MrBeast, I found, all have A-B tests, right? 6:31 But BetterSheets doesn't have an A-B test yet.

But here's the thing, once we start adding these URLs, we don't want to be copying and pasting all of these functions again and again. 6:40 So what we're going to do is add at the beginning of this one of my favorite things, which is if, is blank, and we're going to do A2, and we're going to do two commas, put a parenthesis at the end, and we're going to add this, same thing, if is blank, to the beginning of this. 7:00 As well, put a parenthesis at the end, oh, we have a two equal signs, that's our error , and again at the beginning, take out the equal sign, put a parenthesis, and now, I'm going to keep pressing the wrong button. 7:16 I'm going to copy this, copy this line, and I'm going to go all the way down to a thousand, and I'm going to paste it all the way, whoop, we don't, that's not correct. 7:27 Ah, I see, okay, so we have this B2, we need to take this URL, and actually do, not that, but B, A2, sorry, there we go, and here, as well, we have to fix this, A2, and again, A2, okay, now, copy and paste just all the way down, wam bam, thank you ma'am, we got now a thousand opportunities, put any  7:55 URL in here, and it will automatically pop up if there's an A-B test of the A, the B, and the existing thumbnail right now, so just in case you want to see, you know. 8:04 What the winner is, I think, this could change obviously, probably, they probably do it within the first 24 hours though, so it might change and then be set for the rest of the time. 8:18 Thanks so much for watching, again, there was a lot of stuff here.

But really exciting stuff to be able to scrape this kind of data , the A-B test results of YouTube thumbnails. 8:30 Bye!</div>