How to understand your audience retention on YouTube

Understanding audience retention is crucial to grow your YouTube channel. In this blog post, I will share some tips about how to read (and understand) the data and what you can do to improve your retention.

How to understand your audience retention on YouTube

Let’s start with the definition:
What is audience retention?

Audience retention is how long you can keep your viewers to watch your video. However, based on how the data works on YouTube, the more precise definition is “how big percentage of the people who clicked the video are watching each second of the video”.

So, if 50 people clicked your thumbnail and 25 of those are watching at 0:35, it means your audience retention at 0:35 is 50% (50/25).

This is not always the case though.

Sometimes your audience retention is above 100% and you might wonder how that is possible but that is because it counts as another view when you go back and watch the same thing again.

So, if 20 people clicked your video and they ALL watched the whole video twice, your audience retention throughout the video will be 200%.

So when you see “spikes” in your audience retention graph, it can mean a lot of different things. Either, that part of the video was popular, or it was a text shown too fast so people had to go back and read it again, or someone linked to that specific part in the video so that people started watching from that point, etc... There could be many different reasons for this.

Now, how can we increase this?

That is the million-dollar question.
The answer depends on your channel, your audience, your format, and many other variables, but there are some common things that every channel can start with, so…

Here are 3 things that most channels can do to improve audience retention:

1️⃣ The beginning
On YouTube (and for video marketing in general), people often talk about having a “hook” in your video. When people say this, they are referring to the beginning of the video. It basically means to get people interested and curious about what’s to come later.

Your viewers are often the most skeptical in the beginning of your video, so this is why it is crucial to convince them to watch more and to earn their trust. This is always the part I recommend people to start looking at when they want to improve their retention.

2️⃣ Storytelling
Similar to point 1, you want to use storytelling to create curiosity about what’s to come later in the video. You can do this by introducing questions or problems that will be answered or solved later in the video.

You want to build tension and make people invested in what you’re doing. Find ways to regularly tell/show your viewers why they should continue to watch the video.

3️⃣ The end
This is probably the easiest thing to improve because you can fix this by simply removing it. When people realize that the video is about to end, they know indirectly that there is nothing more of value coming. The story is told, the solution is presented, and all you are doing when ending the video is probably to talk about yourself or summarizing what the viewers have already seen.

Instead, remove this part and introduce another question that you will present the answer to - in another video.

This way, you continue to use storytelling to get people to watch more and more. So when scripting your video, think about what valuable thing from another video that can be relevant to present at the end of the video you are scripting.

I hope this blog post helped you!
You can watch a video with specific examples of how an audience retention graph can look like below and in that playlist (that will show up when you click the link) you can find more tips about YouTube.

🎞 Watch the video here!

Want more YouTube tips like this?

The video is a short snippet from my “YouTube Analytics Deep Dive” which is one of many video lessons inside my online program "Streamlined Creator".

You can get the YouTube Analytics Deep Dive here (or by clicking on the image below) and you can read more about my online program Streamlined Creator on the homepage.

Thanks for reading!

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