Watch time, the key to success?

In their strategy today, YouTube seeks to promote channels that keep users on their platform for a long period of time.  With millions of videos and various media outlets available, if you want to retain your audience’s interest  it’s crucial to propose content that is engaging and meets their expectations.

How will you know what content peaks your audience’s interest?

Previously, people used the number of views or the amount of user engagement (comments, likes, shares, etc) as a reference.   Although these are good things to look at, they don’t give you an accurate idea of how long users generally stay on a given video.

The indicator that is the best suited for this is called the “Average View Duration.”  This can be found in YouTube Analytics under the tab “Audience Retention."

This function can be used on both a channel level and for individual videos.

1/ Phase 1: visibility from the channel page: a time saver!

-          Audience retention: this feature allows you to look at the average view duration (watch time) for the videos on your channel as well as the “average percentage viewed” for each video.  For example, in the image below you can see that the average watch time for videos on the channel FilmsActu is 1 minute 16 seconds or 66%. This figure is a good starting point because it gives you a comparison that you can use to judge the relative performance of each of your videos...

-          To do this, you compare the average percentage viewed of each of the top 10 viewed videos (see image below):

2/ Phase 2: visibility from the individual video page

-          You can use this feature to look at the watch time of any of your videos, whether they are in your top 10 viewed or not.  For example, some of your videos might have few views due to poor thumbnails or metadata, but a really good watch time.  Don’t overlook them – they might help you figure out what filming style, subjects, etc intrigue your audience.

-           When you get on the audience retention page for an individual video, you’ll find 2 tabs, “Absolute audience retention” and “Relative audience retention,” as well as information below that you can sort by date or country. These are all interesting things to look at to compare your videos with each other.

Why is this information important? 

 Thanks to the measurement of a video’s watch time, you can see how long your video was able to keep user on the site, which is a crucial factor in the YouTube SEO.  The better the watch time of your video, the better your video will be referenced by YouTube!

  If you know which videos kept your viewers attention for the longest amount of time (those that have a high view duration compared to the channel average), you can use these videos as “models” and adjust the content/style of your other videos accordingly.

-         If you see that certain videos have been very successful (a lot of views, and high watch times) in a particular country (this is rare but it can happen), you can use these videos to help you understand the right type of programming you would need to target these populations.

3/ Phase 3: A deeper look: Understanding a poor watch time

If a video has a watch time that is below the average percentage of other videos, it is important to understand why. To do this, visit the absolute audience retention of the video and take note of where in the video viewers start to quickly drop off.  From this, you can try to understand the reason for your audience loss and adapt your new video productions in a way that will help you to avoid this problem in the future.