A title is the only part of a video most people will ever see before deciding whether to watch, and it does a surprising amount of work. It has to earn the click, it has to describe the video accurately, and it has to contain the words people search for. Those three jobs occasionally conflict, and most weak titles fail by optimising for only one of them.
What a title is for
Two audiences read it. Someone browsing sees a list and decides in about a second whether to click. Someone searching sees a list of results and decides whether the video answers their question. A title that serves both is specific about content and readable at a glance.
That is why a clear, accurate title usually outperforms a clever one. The clever title wins a click, and then the video fails to deliver, and the viewer leaves. That hurts more than not getting the click at all.
Length and what gets truncated
Around fifty to sixty characters is where the full title displays in most surfaces. Past that it gets cut, and the cut tends to fall off the end, which is where the specific part usually sits. So if a title will be long, put the distinguishing detail first rather than last.
Specificity is the reliable lever
A number makes a title concrete. A time frame makes it scannable. Naming the exact situation makes it findable, since people search in the language of their actual problem rather than your category. “How to fix a squeaky bike chain” is more findable than “Bike repair tips”, and more useful to the person reading it.
Capitalisation and punctuation are smaller levers. Title case does look better in a list, but the effect is small compared with getting the wording right.
Check it against the actual video
The failure worth avoiding is a title that describes a video you did not make. Suggested titles are built from a topic, so they will happily suggest something more dramatic than your content supports. Read the suggestion and ask whether you have delivered it in the first thirty seconds, because that is what the viewer will be checking.
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Testing titles against real search
Before settling on a title it is worth looking at what the autocomplete offers for the phrase you are targeting. When you start typing a query into the search box, the suggestions that appear are drawn from real searches, and they tell you both what people call the thing and what question they are asking about it.
If the suggestions are phrased as questions, that tells you your audience is trying to solve a problem rather than to browse, and a title that promises an answer will outperform one that merely names the subject. It also tells you the exact words to use, which matters because titles are matched literally far more often than people expect.
Look at the top results for the same phrase too, and notice how they are titled. Where several videos use a similar framing, that framing is probably the one that worked, which is a reasonable reason to use it while writing the title yourself rather than lifting theirs wholesale.
The same check is worth doing on the thumbnail, incidentally. Search results often display a frame from the middle of the video rather than the custom thumbnail, so a video needs to look clear in both the listing and at the size a suggestion appears.
None of this replaces judgement about your own video, and none of it beats an accurate title. What it does is stop you guessing at the vocabulary when the answer was available to look up.