YouTube is changing the way it reports on audience retention in order to make it easier for creators to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Last year, channels in YouTube Studio gained access to audience retention insights.
This section of YouTube Analytics reports on “key moments” in videos that received positive feedback from viewers.
It’s intended to assist YouTube creators in determining what resonates with their viewers and what works in terms of their content.
Channels have had the opportunity to review the data and apply the findings to their content creation strategies since the release of the key moments for the audience retention report.
One of the most common pieces of feedback YouTube has received is that it would be useful to know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to audience retention.
In response to the feedback, YouTube has added a new segment of data called typical audience retention.
This data will appear in the form of a grey band across various charts in YouTube Analytics, making it easy to compare actual performance to typical performance.
As an example, consider the screenshot below:
You can get a high-level overview of your entire channel’s key moments, as well as a more detailed analysis of engaging moments in a single video.
Here’s how to locate each of these data sets.
Key Moments in YouTube Videos
By going to YouTube Studio, selecting one of your uploaded videos, and clicking on Analytics, you can find a per-video analysis of key moments.
Scroll down from there to find key moments for audience retention.
These are specific moments in a video when retention exceeds normal patterns. The small spikes that appear throughout the chart represent video chapters.
The first thing you’ll notice is an analysis of the intro that compares its current performance to the average performance of your previous 30 videos.
This analysis allows you to keep track of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to introductions.
By clicking on the Top moment tab on that same page, you can find the most engaging part of a video.
YouTube will display a congratulatory banner with the words:
“Nice work! The video has a part that kept your viewers watching for longer than usual.”
Key Moments on YouTube
Navigate to the Analytics section in the left sidebar and select Engagement from the top menu to see a full channel overview of key moments.
According to YouTube, this section has more potential because it allows you to analyze performance across all of your videos from the previous year.
This report highlights key moments of below-average performance as well as moments of above-average performance.
By selecting the Spikes tab from this screen, you can access another useful report.
You’ll find out if any videos had significant increases in audience retention.
If you use this data to look for patterns, it can be useful.
YouTube provides an example of how it was discovered that segments featuring UI demos resulted in an increase in audience retention.
With that information, the channel will know how to include more UI demos in their videos to keep viewers interested.
Typical Audience Retention Calculation
Finally, it’s worth noting how YouTube determines typical audience retention.
The average audience retention is based on similar-length videos published on a creator’s channel within the last year.
YouTube intends to expand the comparison feature to include not only videos from a creator’s own channel but also videos of similar length from other channels.
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