If you run a YouTube channel, audience retention is one important aspect of your business. High retention YouTube views are different from high number of views. While the latter refers to how many people find your videos, the former shows how many people watch to the end.

Of course, if you are going to pass your message, you want your audience to watch your videos to the end. In this post, we will show you how to increase audience retention on your YouTube videos.

Defining Audience Retention

Before talking about how to attain high retention YouTube views, let’s define audience retention. Different schools of thought have different definitions but they all boil down to the same idea.

Audience retention is an aspect of retention marketing. It refers to the capacity of videos on YouTube to keep the audience engaged. In simpler terms, it is how much of a video the target audience watches. This aspect of analytics is always measured in percentage.

The more engaged your audience is with your videos, the higher the retention score. This score is calculated as the mean or average of the retention figure of each viewer.

Why should you increase Audience Retention?

You must be wondering what the fuss is about audience retention. Well, it is a big deal if you want your videos to rank on YouTube. Just like Google, YouTube is a search engine and has a specific algorithm.

With high retention YouTube views, you get a better ranking. This means that videos with higher retention scores appear higher on search results. The reason for this is that YouTube’s algorithm focuses on customer satisfaction.

Do you now see why increasing audience retention is very important? If you want to attract more attention to your channel, you must increase audience retention. Let’s show you how.

Helpful tips to increase Audience Retention

To show you how important audience retention is, YouTube has provided a way to track your score. In this section, we will show you how to attain high retention YouTube views.

Keyword Research

Putting up videos on YouTube goes beyond making videos. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes. One very important task is researching keywords.

If you take a poll of the most-watched videos (not just for entertainment) on YouTube, they all have something in common. They are either solving a problem, adding value, or meeting a need.

When you research your keywords properly, you know what your target audience needs the most. This allows you to create videos that meet their needs. YouTube has an “auto-suggest” feature to help you do this.

Simply type in your niche and the feature presents you with keyword suggestions. You can create your video content around these keywords.

Another way to find keywords is to check the source code on the videos of your competitors. To do this, check the video that has the highest views.

Now, right-click and click on “view page source.” You can find all the keywords that the owner used. Pick these keywords and work around them for your videos.

Create content to meet the needs of your audience

One of the best ways to attain high retention YouTube views is by finding out your audience’s needs. You can get a clue from the keywords that you researched. Don’t forget that solving problems with your videos will keep your audience glued to the end.

Now that you know what problem you need to solve, it’s time to create content. It is one thing to create content to solve a problem, it is another for the content to be appealing. Find out the kind of content that your audience likes to watch. Use this as a template to create your content and watch your audience retention score rise.

Compare videos

Don't do the exact same thing while expecting different results. Instead, compare your videos. There are two ways to do this and we suggest that you employ both to get the best results.

First, check all the videos you have put up to see the highest performers. Now, find out what you did to make those videos attain high audience retention. Replicate this on your new videos to achieve a similar or higher success rate.

Second, compare your videos with those of your competitors. Even though you can’t see their audience retention score, you can see their views. This should give a vague picture of what they have been doing.

Like we mentioned earlier, you can check for their keywords and use them for your videos as well. To find the best videos in your niche, you can make use of influencer marketing platforms.

Post visually engaging content

This is more difficult for some niches than others. For example, it is easier to post visually engaging content when you are in the design niche. However, if you are teaching a certain topic under SEO, you need to make more effort.

To understand this, we need to explain the idea of visually engaging content. Such content keeps the viewer engaged with the video because the slides aren’t monotonous. From the preview/graphic design viewers see on the search results.

Creating such content goes beyond having a good camera, lighting and props. Usually, videos that have changing scenes come up with higher audience retention scores.

Post shorter videos

This is one of the most widely used strategies today. This is because viewers like to see the result of what you are trying to show them.

However, it is always easier to keep viewers engaged through a one-minute video. If you will do this, make sure that your content will fit into this timeframe. The video doesn’t have to be a minute long, you can shoot videos that are three to five minutes long. It all depends on your niche and the message you want to pass across.

Whatever the case is, make sure that you are creating content that is worth the while of your viewers. Shorter content without quality or value will end up producing low retention scores.

Viewing Attention Retention Stats on YouTube

How do you know that you have high retention YouTube views? You need to check your attention retention statistics. Thankfully, there is a simple way to do this on YouTube.

This platform gives you two ways to check your audience retention report. They are:
⦁ Absolute retention.
⦁ Relative retention.

With absolute retention, you can see the percentage score for each moment in your video. Experts say that you should always watch out for the first 10 to 15 seconds. This is where most viewers stop watching or lose interest.

Relative retention compares your video to others having the same length. The problem here is that the comparison is general, not niche-specific. As such, the results are mostly skewed since your videos are compared to those in other niches.

Checking your retention report is pretty easy. Open your Creator Studio on YouTube, go to analytics, and click on audience retention.

Conclusion

It isn’t so difficult to get high retention YouTube views after all. We have explained several tips to help you do this. It is also important to always check your audience retention reports. In the final part of this post, we have explained how to do this.