I want to give you guys three big major YouTube analytics that you need to keep your eye on in order to improve your channel and grow your audience here on YouTube.
One of you wrote and asked this question.
“I have a questions. Should I care about audience retention rate or only views and watch time?”
Good question. And you need to care about all three of those things. And here’s why. Because the more audience retention that you have, the higher the audience retention score, means the more watch time you’re getting. And usually the more watch time your video accumulates then the more views you’re going to get.
Audience Retention
So let me break it down and show you how the process works. So the first step is audience retention, right? So if you go to your YouTube analytics, you look at your audience retention scores to give you a percentage. They show you the average percentage of the video that someone watches before they abandon that video and move on to another one or just stop watching YouTube entirely. So the better the audience retention scores then that means the more watch time you get, which then means that Google is more likely to favorite that video in search and discovery-related places around YouTube. Related videos and other places like that. And they’ll give it more exposure because of the longer watch time it’s getting from the increased audience retention, which means that you then get more views.
What’s a Good Audience Retention Score?
The couple common questions that go along with this type of conversation is one, what’s a good audience retention rate? Well, I would say when you’re getting up to the upper 60%, the lower 70%, depending on the niche and industry you’re in, I would say that’s probably about average across YouTube for content that maybe starts performing a little bit better than average. Basically just get it up as high as you can, though. And the key to doing that is to watch your audience retention scores for each video that you publish on YouTube. So go into YouTube analytics and see where people are dropping off.
Learn Not to Make Mistakes Over and Over Again
And just try to look for patterns and trends that indicate like, hey. Whenever I queue music towards the end of the video, it’s a trigger. I guess that people think the video’s over so they leave. Or maybe whenever I say these types of words. I say thank you for watching this, even though I have more content, but I say thank you for watching this and people think it’s over. You’ll learn a lot of different things. And then learn to not repeat those mistakes over and over and over again in every video that you do so that you’re cutting off, prematurely, the audience retention score in every video. Because the goal is to get to 100% audience retention even though that’s very, very, very difficult to do. Maybe even impossible to do. But if you can do that then you will get to more watch time which leads to more views.
So you should care about all those things. But one thing that makes this easiest to do, guys, to accumulate higher watch time and higher audience retention scores and all that, is to build an active base of subscribers around your channel. Because a subscriber is more likely to give you more watch time than someone who just randomly finds you would. They’re also more likely to give you more watch time in each video you publish. And one subscriber could be good for a lot of views ongoing into the future, right?
So the best way to build your subscriber base on YouTube I’ve actually outlined in my book. It’s called 30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel, and it’s all about how to make your channel as subscribable as possible. Each day in the book includes some teaching, something that you need to know. It also includes a task, something that you should do right now on your YouTube channel. And then third, it includes further resources if you really want to dig in deep to the topic that we’re discussing that day. The process that this book walks you through works 100% of the time regardless of niche and industry and target audience and everything. Guys, it just flat out works. So if you’re interested in it you can check out the link below to go check it out. And go through that process for making your channel as subscribable as possible and discoverable as possible to the people who need to hear the message that you’re spreading.
I’d love to hear from you guys in the comments below. What tips and advice you have for someone who wants to increase their audience retention scores on their videos as well as get more views and more watch time and all that. Leave those down below. If that’s a question that you’re currently wrestling through right now read the comments that people are leaving. I know the community around here is awesome. I always learn from them. I know you will, too.