A 12% plunge in our YT views?!  😡

March 4, 2026

On a long enough timeline, every marketer will face their own horror show. That pit-of-your-stomach dread when something goes terribly wrong. 

Today, I got permission to share a scary story of our own: When our Español YouTube team discovered their entire catalog had plunged by over 10% in viewership overnight. 😱

But fear not, this story has the kind of happy ending usually only found on the silver screen. Plus, tips to make your own happily-ever-after, and your very own copy of the tracking template our YT team uses every day.

Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society Marketing Against the Grain audience, I call this story: The tale of how one YT channel turned a library-wide traffic plunge into a 22% increase in views. 

Inside Scoop

Headwinds of horror

“The Español channel saw some… headwinds,” says Nelson Chacón Guzman, politely describing a sudden 12% channel-wide drop in views. (When I saw the screenshots, even I had to yell, “¡Caray!”)

“A lot of our videos were embedded in articles on the HubSpot blog,” he explains. This was a great source of activated traffic until the blog team had to make some big strategy changes early last year.

“When the blog audited and sunsetted old articles, we saw a correlating drop in our library.” And since those views were coming from a relevant, highly-engaged audience, losing that traffic created an outsized drop in lead conversion, as well.

This is where a lot of marketers would have simply written off the losses. You can’t beg another team to go against their own metrics. 

But Guzman is a Marketing Fellow for our Audience Development team, and, in HubSpot terms, that means his job description is somewhere between Gandalf and the astronaut guy from The Martian. And he had a plan. 

Reigniting that spark

Guzman knew he needed to act fast due to the compounding nature of the YouTube algorithm. When YT sees a loss in traffic, it will often assume a loss of popularity and deprioritize those videos. 

But, conversely, when it sees enduring traffic growth, the algorithm often responds by serving that content to a wider audience. 

With that in mind, the plan was to “reignite” these videos in the search algorithm, replacing the lost referral traffic with brand new organic search traffic. 

To do that, Guzman and his team first used a tool called VidIQ to help identify long-tail keywords that were most relevant to each video. 

Shiny new keyword targets in hand, the team set out to re-optimize all of the meta-content that surrounds each given video. 

“Once the video is uploaded to YouTube, it’s set. There’s nothing you can do [to the video itself],” he says. Instead, “we changed the title, the description, the CTA, the closed captions, the tags, all those things.”

The sudden influx of new keyword signals makes the algorithm want to trial your content in front of audiences and see how they react. 

When that happens, it’s critical that your audience engages with your content to reinforce this process. So the final piece of the puzzle is A/B testing new thumbnail images to maximize initial views and watch time. 

The result was a 22% increase in overall views and a 16% increase in leads from videos that could have otherwise sat around collecting dust. 

Check out Guzman's tips for reviving content, plus steal a copy of the actual spreadsheet he uses. 

Scoop It Yourself

Just for you, I’ve smuggled out a copy of the actual spreadsheet our YouTube team uses to track and forecast views and conversions. 

Okay, I lied; Nelson made a custom copy for you to download. But it really is based on his personal spreadsheet.

Must See

Join 270k+ industry leaders who have traded generic headlines for the sharp, contrarian insights needed to outpace the market.

Stop reacting to tech trends and start engineering them with expert advice delivered straight to your inbox.

Upgrade your intel with Daily Tech Insider.

This week's email was brought to you by Curt del Principe. Editing by Laura M. Browning.

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Business news, but not boring: The Hustle | Stay current on AI: Mindstream | I Sell better: The Science of Scaling

Follow Marketing Against the Grain on LinkedIn and Instagram

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.