There are different levels of insights for improving audience retention on YouTube videos. This time, I want to focus on 17 advanced retention insights that you can use to improve your YouTube retention.
1. Viewer History: How long people watch your new videos is closely connected to how long they watched previous videos. If they had a bad experience with your past video, they'll probably click away from your new one faster.
2. Character Association: Viewers can learn to associate certain characters with wasting time. If they recognize that character in a new segment, they’ll be more likely to tune out because of that negative association.
3. Retention Analysis: Retention charts show when the bad parts of your video start to outweigh the good ones.
4. Impact of Suspense: Extending moments of suspense is a great way to keep your viewers engaged. People tend to stick around longer when they’re interested to find out what happens next.
5. Authority Matters: In educational content, if you don’t establish authority in a believable way, you can lose viewers. They’ll drop off during parts of the video where your credibility is important.
6. B-Roll Disconnect: While B-roll can help visualize your content, it can also make viewers feel less connected to the host, which can make them less engaged.
7. Music Volume: Loud music can ruin your video. It's possible for people to leave your video early because of loud music alone. Yes, I've seen a lot of videos flop because of this.
8. YouTube Analytics: It’s possible that having a high Average Percentage Viewed (APV) is not a good thing. This could mean your video isn’t reaching a broader audience because YouTube only shows it to people it knows will watch long.
9. Stake Reminders: Don’t forget to regularly remind the viewer of what’s at stake if a goal isn’t reached yet. This will help to keep them engaged for longer.
10. Retention Mindset: Retention rules shouldn’t ever contradict each other. If they do, one or both of the rules are likely wrong.
11. Retention Spikes: If your retention charts show that there are a lot of spikes, don't just try to create more of those moments. Focus on making the content in between better to keep people interested the whole time.
12. Delayed Retention Loss: Not all mistakes can be seen right away on retention charts. Viewers often take a moment before tuning out, so drops aren’t always instant.
13. Segmentation Loss: If you want to keep viewers engaged for longer, you need to learn to deal with segmentation loss, which is the natural drop in interest after a segment finishes.
14. Satisfying Exit Points: Some content isn’t designed to be watched until the end. Make sure there are satisfying parts throughout the video so that people who leave early still feel good about it.
15. Audience Care: People don't care as much as you think they do about how you feel. If you talk about something personal instead of the subject at hand, they may lose interest.
16. Competitor Influence: Your competitors' editing styles can influence your own retention. If everyone’s using the same style, viewers might lose interest faster because your content seem less outstanding.
17. Quick Tricks: To improve retention on YouTube, focus on a deep understanding of how people watch content. Don’t rely on quick tricks, such as “watch until the end for a mystery surprise,” that only work in specific situations.
All of these insights are nuanced, but having simple guidelines can help you better understand what to focus on.