Audience Retention Dreadful? Try This!

so recently YouTube added some Channel analytics cards to the mobile version of the YouTube studio app and it makes it look a lot more like the desktop version which is absolutely awesome but I'm not here to talk about that I'm here to talk about this typical performance metrics were first introduced a couple of years back when YouTube MV brand new studio they are a fantastic snapshot way of seeing if a video is over over or underperforming versus your Channel's average and of course such metrics leave us creators saying ooh I really like that can I

have some more of this please well thankfully and fortunately on this occasion YouTube's answer to such a question is yes yes you can let's go even more granular and so the result is that if you scroll down the overview page of a videos analytics you will now see the average view duration displayed both as the actual and typical performance so in this example this particular video to begin with had higher audience retention than usual for a vid IQ video but that Advantage was quickly lost after which point the video performed as normal and so this

cursory glance at the data leads to two questions what did we do right in the first 30 seconds and then what did we do wrong immediately afterwards well if we review the video a little bit Dan did an excellent job of delivering the promise of the very intriguing creators can now get access to the community tab with 500 subscribers instead of a th000 subscribers this is great awesome news delivered at the very start of the video there's also some nice patent interrupts going on to re-engage a viewer but then after a fantastic start with audience

retention well above typical this happens personally I've always wondered why the community tab was locked behind this 1,000 subscriber threshold we've had it for a very long time now it seems as if Dan saying personally was a trigger word for some viewers to abandon the video and on top of this Dan talks the camera with no pattern interrupts for a extended period of time now let me stress at this point this is not a critical attack on Dan he actually did an excellent job with this video one of the things we pride ourselves on here

at vid IQ is bringing important YouTube news to you the viewer in a fast and easy to understand way and Dan did exactly that the video's overall performance is above average and it's got some great browse traffic 2 weeks after launch which really is a testament to that title and thumbnail this is an example of Dan executing 99 things out of 100 perfectly but the one thing that just needed a little bit of tweaking caused the audience retention to drop significantly and when you've made enough videos and you have enough experience being a creator that

is a level of detail you're going into to try and get those marginal gains from your content your ultimate goal as a Creator is to satisfy the viewer as much as possible which in turn sends more positive signals to YouTube so if you can tweak your content to improve audience retention that in turn should mean that YouTube shares your content with more people thus leading to more views anyway it's enough of a dam bashing it's time to take a critical look at [Music] myself I don't think there is any question that this video has a

cool intro but what has it achieved by the end of it the viewer hasn't really learned anything and they're probably not even sure they're in the right place the problem is I got far too wrapped up in making a very fan intro at the expense of a viewer's needs and it shows in this very mediocre average view duration but here's the real hidden cost of all of this that none of you probably even noticed this intro took me hours to make I think it was about 3 hours in the end just for 20 seconds of

content that none of you were really fussed about and that is a really critical lesson for me to understand you as viewers are not particularly interested in artistic and creative expression on our videos and that is completely understandable what you really want from us is YouTube education and value everything else is secondary and once I started talking about the value of the daily ideas tool and how it can help you as a Creator the audience retention recovered to the higher end of our video's typical performance but unfortunately the the damage had already been done what

audience retention percentage should I be aiming for that's a question we often get asked here at vid IQ unfortunately just like the click-through rate question it's impossible to answer there is no magic number but what I will now say is that this is the best next alternative answer previously you could view relative audience retention that compared your video to other videos of a similar length on YouTube but such benchmarking feels awfully vague but now you have the power to B Benchmark against yourself and this is the purest form of data that will drive insights into

future Improvement you've probably heard me talk about this concept before improving 1% with every video that you make well benchmarking your average view duration is the perfect place to start improving your content 1% at a time and of course as always this metric leaves me wanting even more YouTube can you do exactly the same thing for clickthrough rates actual performance versus typical performance and surely everybody agrees now that the new YouTube studio is it new anymore is awesome it's got so many things many of which you might not even be aware of so check them

all out over here