So you’re digging through your YouTube Analytics a little bit, and you notice that you have some videos on your channel that are bringing down your channel’s overall audience retention score. So do you remove those videos, privatize them, delete them, or does it have any impact on your channel at all?
TheKiwiColonel wrote and asked this.
Hey Tim, I was wondering about the video SEO. I realize that my old videos drag down the retention score percentage. So how does it work? Is it done by watch time of the percentage in terms of the SEO?
That’s a good question, a common one that confuses a lot of creators, so I’m glad you asked it.
The way it works is that each video in your channel is treated individually, separately from each other. So if you have one video on your channel, it just does really terrible that doesn’t necessarily affect the rest of the videos that you’re going to publish. Each video is just kind of treated and rated and ranked individually regardless of how the other videos on your channel ranked. So if you have like 100 really bad videos, the 101st video might do really awesome.
So why would YouTube then give you that statistic of showing you, hey your channel’s overall audience retention is you know, 68% and it’s mostly because you have these three videos over here that have a total of like 20% and you have all these other ones are like 80%. So should you remove the 20? No. Because it doesn’t influence all the other videos.
But the reason why YouTube shows you those, that number in the first place, is that you can get like a ballpark idea of how your channel is performing overall. YouTube themselves does not take that number into consideration when they determine how to rank future videos that you’re publishing. That number is just there for your own sake, for your own benefit, to kind of get a good overall feeling, good overall picture of how you’re doing in audience retention across all of your videos. So no, you don’t need to go back and remove those older videos.
But I would make sure that the videos I’m publishing from that point in the future are doing better, that they’re increasingly growing, that my audience retention scores, like I’m figuring out the things that are causing my audience to drop off and to abandon my videos. And we’re removing those things from future videos. So I’m continually crafting better videos. And that is exactly what that number is there for. To help you craft better videos, to accumulate more watch times so those videos then, can perform better in search.
If that is something you care about, about developing really good content, about developing a channel where people are subscribing actively and becoming a part of your community, then I would really highly recommend my book, not just because I wrote it. Because I really do think it’s valuable. And I love seeing how every channel that’s going through it, and they come out the other side of this 30 day process, how their channel is just growing. And I love hearing those stories, it’s so awesome. The book is called “30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel“. It’s linked up down below or an interactive cart or click and go check it out.
Every day includes a teaching, and it says, here’s what you need to know about your channel. And then two, every day includes a task, something practical that you’re going to do on your channel right then and there to improve it. And then third, is further resources if you really want to dig in to that topic for that day and really take it to the next level. And at the end of the 30 days, you get a YouTube channel that is as highly optimized as possible to convert non– first of all get viewers, but then to convert those viewers into subscribers, and then to start building a community with those people who are gravitating towards your content.
So check it out if that’s something that you’re interested in. But I would love to hear from you guys in the comments below. In the meantime, what advice would you have for the TheKiwiColonel? And he’s trying to figure out the audience retention across his channel and SEO metrics that are associated with that. And definitely check out the comments down there below if this is something that you were wondering and thinking through yourself.