Social Media Tutorials by Jacob Curtis

Understanding YouTube Audience Retention

YouTube Audience Retention is important! Say, you take the time to create and upload what you think is the next viral video of all time. Except you’re not getting the views, shares, likes, or subscribes you were hoping for…

Well…chances are your video and sucks you’ve lost your viewers attention. FEAR NOT! With YouTube Audience Retention Analytics you can find out when YouTube viewers stop watching, and make appropriate changes to your videos to keep viewers engaged.

SEE ALSO: Understanding YouTube Annotations Analytics

Youtube Audience Retention
The first 5-15 seconds of your video are the most important! Hook your audience in.

YouTube displays audience retention in two forms. Absolute and Relative.

1. Absolute audience retention helps you see how often each moment of your video is being watched as a percentage of total views. Rewinding and re-watching can result in values higher than 100%

2. Relative audience retention shows your video’s ability to retain viewers during playback by comparing it to all YouTube videos of similar length.

You should be using these two forms of YouTube provided audience retention analytics to your advantage. Watch this video to learn how.

Ready for more lessons? Check out more how-to guides and social media tutorials.

Jacob Curtis

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4 responses to “Understanding YouTube Audience Retention”

  2. Nice tutorial! I just did a screen cast 9 minutes and retained 69%. Why am I telling you this?! When viewing relative audience retention I thought it would have stayed well “above average” the entire time! It hovered around average. How can that be!? I typically will do subjects of 7 minutes but this one at 69% is the highest I’ve seen. Also why does absolute audience retention go up and down up and down?! Love to know or know where to better understand this! thanks for your screencast.

    Reply

  4. Audience Retention defiantly is one of the stronger signals for Google. It is the same way that people troll the results and put up a video thumbnail and when you click the video it turns out to be something else.
    The audience retention drop off is such a big factor in YouTube, that is why most of the videos leave the search results in a matter of days
    Good point btw about having the video over 100% when people pause and rewind!

    Reply

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