Videos retention is very important for your YouTube videos to get higher ranking. Audience who sees your videos must be engaged and should find your videos more valuable. The more the audience likes your videos the longer they will watch it, and this is why YouTube came up with the average audience retention as a ranking factor.
So, the better the retention, the better ranking you get for your videos and also get more views.
Video retention is measured as the average percentage of the videos watched by your audience. If they simply view the first three minutes of a 10-minute video, you can expect a retention rate of 30 percent. This is an important measure for YouTube, and content creators should aim for a retention rate of at least 50%. Of course, this is a generic goal. The percentage will also depend on the video length, niche and more factors!
You can’t have control on the engagement of your audience but by creating quality content you can engage your audience more. Sometimes you may fail to provide content engaging enough or more likely, fail to reach your target audience and you will therefore not get a good video retention on your videos. By this you may lose all your YouTube success or ranking.
The solution to this failure in views that some people try is to purchase YouTube views. But this, might just make things worse. To get more views, many people buy the views from the different websites which are available on the internet…a bit randomly. But if you want to really buy more views, then you must try the high retention method, otherwise, the purchased views will just be harmful. Because video retention gives boost to your videos and also gets more and more views.
Therefore, if you are going to get some views for your YouTube video, make sure you are purchasing high retention views, as they will have a positive impact on the most important metric on YouTube: audience retention.
But in this article, we will also see how we can improve our audience reach and videos retention to get better ranking and more views – without necessary having to buy them.
Below, an infographic I did for you to boost your video retention 🙂
5 Helpful Tips to Improve Audience Reach and Video Retention
1) Keyword Research
Uploading Videos on YouTube is not enough. To get video reach and high video retention, you need to work a lot after uploading video. YouTube is not only a video platform, but also the 2nd largest search engine platform after google. So to get more views and to reach the most relevant audience for your videos you must work on the SEO part, and Keyword Research is one of the SEO techniques.
Keyword Research will tell you which topics are trending but also, to find topics that are close to your niche in order to attract relevant viewers that will enjoy your video and stick longer.
2) Create content that meets your audience requirements
To get high quality video retention you need to create good quality content in videos which must meet the requirement of your target audience. Without having a good quality of video content, no one is going to watch your video properly.
So by this your video will get bad retention and through this your videos ranking will reduce. And as a consequence you will not get as many views as you want on YouTube.
Find out what your target audience likes to watch and then create that sort of content. And make it engaging!
3) Analyze your videos
Don’t just upload your videos on YouTube. You must have a look after 2 or 3 days to see how your videos are performing and how your videos are attaining audience retention. Analyzing is the best way to get an idea what needs to be improved in your next video to get more video retention.
In the Youtube Analytics option, you will see the retention rate of your uploaded videos and learn from them how you can improve. You will also see in which part viewers abandoned the video most, so to avoid similar mistakes in future and get each time a better response.
More than half of the time spent viewing videos indicates a strong rate of relative retention (50 percent and above). When you know where the majority of your viewers stop watching a video, you’ll know what to do about it when you make your next video.
Also, analyze your most popular videos to see what drew people in and what kept them there.
4) Post Engaging Contents Frequently
Always posting engaging content is not possible because day by day peoples change their interest and this behaviour may change your videos performance too.
And by this you may also get demotivation of create good quality videos. So at this point you need a strong motivation and need to think out of the box for creating a good engaging video content, and most importantly, you need to do it frequently in order to post fresh content that will have great retention.
Pro-tip: Videos with more scenes and a variety of topics are what your viewers will be looking for. Generally, videos containing a variety of situations are more likely to keep viewers engaged!
5) Post Short “Trailer” Videos Too
Posting shorter trailer videos can also be beneficial for you. As we see on television, most of the ads or movie trailers are presented very short to give an idea of what is going to come in the future. And this increases your audience’s interest in watching your upcoming videos.
You can consider this trick as an old trick because this was implemented on television ads but now these tricks are also implemented on Youtube. So try to make shorter videos and post them before 2-3 days of posting your main video content.
To conclude, attaining high video retention is not so difficult, but you have to keep working hard, produce relevant, fresh and quality content, and you must check the stats of your video’s retention on a regular basis in YouTube Studio Analytics.