in this video we're going to be talking all about audience retention what exactly is audience retention why does it matter so much for getting views and succeeding on youtube and we're going to be revealing six different tips for how to rank your videos higher in search and getting youtube to actually recommend your videos you got to just press record my name is sean cannell and i'm fired up to talk about how to trigger the youtube algorithm with these seven tips for increasing watch time audience retention and youtube views so what's the average audience retention on
youtube well according to some reports the average audience retention on youtube is between 50 and 60 percent now audience retention is your ability to hold someone's attention on your video if you look at your analytics which we will do shortly there's sometimes the hockey stick effect where someone clicks on your video and they're gone immediately so the question is how quick how how long can you hold attention this is across digital platforms now have you ever started a netflix show watched a few seconds or minutes and thought ah i'm not even going to commit to
this and you bailed well it didn't keep your attention if a video that you love holds your attention you might click on it and watch it all the way into the end and watch multiple videos from that creator and so some data revealed that if you can keep someone's attention over half of the length of your video or even over 60 percent you're doing a pretty good job there's a couple terms we need to know and and we also need to know why audience retention is important and here's some quotes from youtube themselves they've said
that we've started adjusting the ranking of youtube videos to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching it's not just views because you know a view can just be one second but a minute that means you've held someone for 60 seconds youtube rewards content creators that create engaging videos and you know when it comes to engagement sure likes are okay comments are great but the most significant signal is whether or not someone keeps watching your video that's watch time that's audience retention they go on to say that videos with consistently high audience retention and watch time
have the potential to show up more frequently in search and suggested locations so not only is having a high audience retention going to help you rank your videos in search it's also going to help your videos be recommended by the youtube algorithm to new viewers so audience retention is very important now there's two specific terms that we need to know to understand this and the first one is average view duration so this i know there's a lot of technical terms audience retention average view duration well this is the way that youtube kind of defines audience
retention and it's how many minutes have people watch your vid videos average view duration in the case of this video right here this video has been viewed for seven minutes and three seconds and remember this is on average because of course some people might start the video and say ah this isn't what i thought it was i'm gonna bail but some people are gonna watch all the way until the end so the total combined viewership averaged down this video is able to hold viewers attention for seven minutes now consider this this video is doing very
well and youtube continues to recommend it to new people and therefore on average even people that potentially don't know me or haven't seen my content before their attention is being held for seven minutes of time in a world where we can barely have the attention span to scroll through instagram or go from this thing to that thing and we're so busy giving your attention for seven minutes to something is significant minutes matter most i've seen stats reveal that the average view duration on youtube is around five minutes think media kind of hovers between four and
five minutes across all of our videos so if you start getting to 7 minutes 8 15 and if youtube recommends that video to new people and you're holding attention well then of course they would keep showing it to even more new people because the avd the average view duration is significant the second stat is just another way of thinking about the same thing but it's average percentage viewed now let's say you had a one hour video your average view duration could be ten minutes but that would only be six percent or whatever you know 10
minutes out of 60 minutes would only be 12 or something like that whereas if you had a 10 minute video and you had a 50 average percentage viewed that means it's five minutes so it's how long on average are people cr consuming of the entire video length and by youtube showing us these two stats they're revealing to us what they care about they're saying hey keep people on the platform for as many minutes as possible and then also if you can create videos that people are getting closer to the end of that are that they're
watching at least half the video 60 of the video or higher then this is like a one-two punch of audience retention that could really trigger the algorithm and cause your videos to be promoted now youtube has given us some new insights and they're always up upgrading the studio to show us things and when you're on a specific video you can come down to key moments and audience retention and this chart guide is right here on a little question mark let me zoom in for you and so what we can see is this is youtube explaining
what the chart means now it may be self-explanatory but this is very important the first thing that it tells us is when the line is flat well the first thing it says a percent greater than 100 percent may mean that people re-want rewind and watch the sequence more than once so if you ever wonder why is there a spike how could i have or how could it go up when it was already going down it means someone's either clicked bla clicked back or clicked to that specific point but flat is your ideal so this video
is doing very well on think media and this video is not flat but you can see it's kind of close to flat i mean 50 average view duration which is great over most people or the all people that watch it average down to finishing over half of the video and there is a gradual decline but by the end of this video at minute 4 16 38 of people are still watching so it's not as aggressive this is more aggressive on this video but again what it's telling us is that if you can keep it flat
that's what winning looks like you are literally holding keeping in mind too the average person like if strangers watch the video like they can't turn away they gotta watch the whole thing gradual decline the second um thing that youtube defines here means viewers are losing a bit of attention over time so then you're saying okay how can i decrease the slope and i've got six tips for you in a second how can i make the decline not as significant of course what you don't want is the hockey stick effect where it just drops you know
really fast kind of flattens out and maybe only a couple percent finish the video next spikes appear when more viewers are watching re-watching or sharing a moment or moments from a video so spikes are these kind of it gives us green because green is good it's sort of these up moments where maybe people go to a part rewind from a part the other reason you might trigger this is because of time stamps and we do use time steps to let people skip through the points on certain videos and they may get the idea and they
may just kind of click through to get each time stamp um that's fine in my opinion because i want the viewer to just be served at the highest level i'm not trying to hold anybody hostage you know so if they want to click through to the points but another thing that spikes could be just telling you is that that's a very dense part or popular part here's a power tip if you've ever seen some youtubers and even bo burnham did this on his recent netflix special they sometimes flash something so flat uh so fast kind
of like a fight club thing they flash a scene or flash a word that your super fans or any fan may want to rewind and be like and try to pause it what was that and that could create a higher spike of engagement at that moment and so that would be the up and then of course dips mean viewers are skipping or leaving that specific part of the video and if i click here notice it says here's the intro viewer's still watching around the 30-point mark which is this blue section and then it says dip
and if i click the dip it actually skips to where there is a significant drop and naturally that's when i'm like well alrighty then leave me a comment we'll see you later and that's going to typically be you don't want to necessarily let people know you're ending your video and once they know it's gone they start to leave and that makes sense so the biggest thing though is if you have dips in the middle you want to ask yourself what can i learn from that dip so let's look inside of our analytics and then we'll
get to our tips here and the first thing for measuring audience retention and seeing kind of doing a checkup from the neck up of your status is some ways to track how well you're doing the first is channel wide avd that's channel wide average view duration so if you start in your studio you go to analytics and then you go to your engagement you can see that across all of your channel on think media right here we get 4 minutes and 12 seconds and that's up in the last 28 days always trying better storytelling hold
more attention have an increased average view duration so that's kind of a macro metric of how are you doing on your channel think media in the last 28 days got 3.2 million views and so that's spread out across all of those views next is going to be the top videos in this period and that's whatever period that you set by default it's 28 days let's just say over the last 365 days for fun in the upper right hand corner and then we can see these right here these are the top videos in the last year
on think media now notice two things that it shows us at a snapshot and this really reveals what youtube cares about the most it says average iteration and it gives us the total minutes and the percentage viewed and then it gives us the views it's like hey this video is getting two minutes and 27 seconds of average view duration and it lets you kind of compare and you can notice that some of these really big videos i mean this got over a million views it keeps getting suggested to new audiences notice a very low percentage
view to only 16 but 21 minutes and 16 seconds of total minutes viewed this is a very longer tutorial it's a longer tutorial and so again minutes matter most even though that's a horrendous percentage viewed it's an insane amount of time spent on a video and so that is another place that you can check so to recap you have channel wide avd average view duration you can see the top videos in this period and be studying what's your average view duration your average percentage viewed then you want to go to your top videos and you
can click see more for even more data so i'm going to go back to the last 28 days i'm on engagement inside of youtube studio and i'm gonna go down to top videos and say see more in the back end here we can see a whole stack of videos so it goes much more than the top ten and it breaks down our click-through rate our views our average view duration is shared right here and this is where the average is coming from four minutes and 12 seconds across all these videos and i could see this
is interesting the average view duration on this best camera q a with with me is an hour it's insane like that's crazy uh and and then you can see some that are maybe only 37 seconds or whatever so that's another place where you can dive into your analytics a little bit deeper and then finally still watching at 30 seconds and lean in for this one and hit like if you've been getting value out of this video because again this is going to tell us what really matters to youtube and so inside of your studio under
engagement scroll down a little bit you're going to see key moments for audience retention and this is significant because this is showing us out of our recent uploads how many people are still watching at 30 seconds this is very clear about how important the hook of your video is right because they're saying if if people are bailing in the first 30 seconds like you're in trouble so in out of our last few videos our best video has 71 percent of people still watching after 30 seconds when i hover over it we can see that the
average iteration is five and a half minutes and 40 percent of people basically consume that one and then it drops to our worst performing is still four out of 10 people are still watching at um 30 in the first 30 seconds these are signals when youtube tells us what they're measuring then it tells us how we should architect and craft our content to get more views and hold more attention it also gives us the ability to actually measure if the tweaks we're making to our content our videos and our topics are working and never forget
what gets measured gets improved so i know that sometimes the data can be overwhelming but consider studying your data even looking at it while it feels overwhelming because you will start to notice trends and patterns and places where you can improve your videos if you're seeing a dip think about okay how can i trim the fluff on my next video improve the audience retention average view duration and the more that goes up the more youtube is going to spread your content throughout the internet faster than a tesla in ludicrous mode let's get into the six
tips tip number one for powering up your videos boosting your audience retention is craft a powerful hook i won't go into this at length because we have some great resources on this but it's ultimately you really need to craft those first 10 20 30 seconds of your video you may notice some hooks are even going much longer hooks of videos are a minute two minutes now depending on how long the content is but it's just thinking that as soon as the video starts cut to the chase tip number two talk fast or faster and use
video editing now hear me this does not mean that there aren't youtube channels that have a slower pace to them sometimes you might hear asmr at a very slow and soothing pace sometimes there's videos that are more reflective or meditative and that could be very effective especially consider the viewer's intent what is it they expect but most people have this modern energy of just wanting the information fast we don't want to wait around and if we feel like there's a moment of we're not getting what we came for then we may want to speed up
to hold attention it doesn't mean you have to be super frantic it doesn't mean you have to be crazy but studies have been done to actually count words per minute and that the higher words per minute on youtube usually holds attention better than lower words per minute and another way to do this is with video editing it could be as simple as you just talk at your normal pace in your normal tone but there's a level of jump cutting that sort of cuts out the ums and the breaths and this is a pace and a
cadence that you're going to want to determine for your yourself but it's certainly a tip that could help people just stick with it because the information is coming fast enough that they do not get bored tip number three use a script or an outline prior planning prevents poor performance when you start a video you get into a video if it's disorganized if it doesn't if it's disorganized and you lose people on the journey then that might be the moment they bounce because again it was you were able to cut that part out but you didn't
really plan it out ahead so like that's when people lost attention if you have a good outline an orderly outline a logical outline or a good story curve or story arc then that's going to help you hold attention by scripting your videos ahead of time they're going to be a lot more powerful number four trim the fluff man one of the best ways you can make your content stronger i learned from jizza from the wu-tang clan and he said too many rappers rhymes are mad long keep it brief son half short and twice strong and
that's the tip you want to keep it half short and twice strong thank you gizza thank you the wu tang and so trim the fluff how could you make your ten minute video five minutes how could you make your eight minute video six minutes is there any parts in your video that are unnecessary what can you take away ask yourself is this essential to the video nobody watching it is going to know it's gone they're only going to know what they see when you finally present it to them so trim the video down trim the
fluff and the key here is continue to post videos as you have been but then study your audience retention curve study how much average view duration you're getting see how you're holding people's attention and if you can notice a tip or a trend from where people are always dropping off then consider eliminating that from your video and on your next upload it'll be even better tip number five add visuals one of the best ways to hold attention longer is to not just potentially monotonously just have one thing happening you know i'm streaming this live using
stream yard and i'm able to add visuals because of the software this at least helps a little bit but in post we could make little pop-up you know like button things little subscribe things transitions music transitions those types of things should not be overused but they can they can help keep attention longer and so consider adding visuals like graphics and pop-ups and extra footage called b-roll and things like that that strengthen your video and then tip number six out of seven tips is use drama conflict open loops and curiosity so one of the ways you
could hold attention and even if you're going longer at this point um i'm 23 minutes into a video live streaming um one of the things i hoped to do at the beginning of the video is during the hook i said man i'm coming i'm sharing seven tips i'm gonna be sharing some new features from youtube hopefully opening up some curiosity to make you want to be a part of more of an educational tutorial like this in more of entertainment you want to potentially use drama consider how reality tv shows start they don't start with again
when kim and khloe kardashian are getting along and it's like kim and chloe peacefully walk through a park nobody wants to watch that it's like kim like throws a piece of pie across the kitchen and breaks a plate and it's like coming up on with kardashians chloe i can't believe that you did that they what do they do they cut to the most dramatic part so potentially you want to tease the drama you want to create a little conflict on the opening you want to create some open loops like maybe there's a question at the
beginning you're going to answer at the end maybe you're doing a tutorial and you're saying you know this is what the end result is going to be i'm going to show you how to get there and people are like wait a minute how'd they achieve that result and you unfold that throughout the video tip number seven is build your personal brand and reputation what do i mean by this one of the things i mean by this is i want you to consider if you're just starting on youtube and let me know how many videos have
you posted so far and how many subscribers do you have if you're just starting nobody knows you yet i recommend if you're just starting keep your videos shorter because people could get to know you speed dating they may not want to get married yet you know what i mean like it's just a little bit of a shorter relationship up front but once people get to know you then there might be some pre-existing trust when it comes to your content this is sort of the unspoken rule on youtube see if you don't have a good reputation
yet your reputation is potentially just neutral so you may have to use more b-roll or or really structure content or really edit it to whatever degree of influence i've built and you could let me know if i've ever added value to you or if you've seen a past video or how long have you been a part of the think community at some level if you start to trust me and recognize that hopefully when i go live get on camera i bring really value that i've invested blood sweat and tears in research my experience the think
media team our collective youtube brain all this different stuff that we work together on that you might actually give me some forgiveness this is why you might be like why does this person have such good average iteration of people because people don't know you yet but as you build your personal brand and as you build your reputation people begin to know and trust you more so that they may without the fancy barrels and whistles stick with you because they know you're good for it so the actionable point of tip number seven is just consider giving
it always your best shot to deliver quality to people develop a reputation if you're a teacher or expert or author or marketer and you're kind of more education like think media for being brief being bright being fun and then being done and when people say okay because of my past experience with you i know that if i click on a sean cannell youtube video or a nolan mo youtube video or a heather taurus youtube video or an omar el taquori youtube video that they really have put their heart into this it's gonna probably not be
a waste of my time and that's about building that is the bigger vision of building a personal brand and a reputation that is beyond tactics because a little subscriber pop-up is not going to change the game for your youtube channel those tactics are good but a strong personal brand and reputation in your industry for the promise of your channel is gonna supersede those other tactics wanna know the exact strategies sean cannell and the think media team use to consistently get over 3.5 million views on youtube every month learn the proven steps and the newest youtube
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