YouTube Launches Improved Viewer Retention Insights to Help Guide Your Content Approach

YouTube’s adding more new metrics to help improve the performance of your channel, with specific insight into the elements of each video that are maximizing audience engagement, via improved retention stats.

Last year, YouTube added new audience retention insights for video clips, which provides info on where viewers are engaging, and dropping off in the playback, in order to help improve your content approach.

Now YouTube’s looking to improve on this, by providing more comparative insight, and more specific measures for segments in clips.

First off, YouTube’s adding a new ‘typical’ retention comparison line in the chart, which will highlight your channel’s regular retention performance, giving you an immediate benchmark for each clip.

As you can see in this image, the new gray line will show where you’re usually seeing viewer drop-offs in videos of comparative length, giving you a better understanding of the relative performance for each of your uploads. YouTube’s also, eventually, looking to expand this beyond your own clips, with the ‘Typical’ line incorporating video performance on other, similar channels as well, but that element is still in the works.

YouTube’s also looking to provide comparison charts for different elements, with options to display your performance listings by ‘Intro’, ‘Top Moments’, ‘Spikes’ and ‘Dips’.

As you can see in this example, with the new retention insights data, you’ll be able to see which of you videos are performing above or below your regular performance measures in each of these categories, which will help you further hone in on the key aspects that appeal to viewers in your clips.

In addition to this, YouTube’s also adding support for Chapters in the chart, which will show you which specific elements are driving better response and retention in your clips.

That’s important, because YouTube’s looking to add more chapters across the board, with the implementation of auto-chapters, which will eventually help the platform provide more guidance, and search capacity, for video clips.

As such, chapter performance could become a much more important factor, especially if parent company Google starts using chapters in Search results. With this new chart, you would be able to see, for example, if a significant amount of users are only interested in a certain segment, which could give you more impetus to further explore that element, or cut down on the supplementary details in your clips.

These are valuable insights, providing more specific guidance on viewer performance, which could play a big role in defining your video content strategy. If you’re seeing spikes in certain elements, for example, you can get a better idea of why that is, which could then point in the right direction for boosting engagement with future clips

At the least, it’ll definitely be worth experimenting with. You can learn more about YouTube’s latest metric updates here.