According to Dan, a YouTube interaction designer, the Creator Studio has featured an audience retention graph, but it offered little information. All it really showed was a single graphed line that displayed the percentage of starting viewership retained during the time span of the video in question. This display only gave creators a general idea about their video’s viewer retention. Now, after the update, Creator Studio will use four “key moments” retention analytics tools to better detail viewer retention on individual videos. These “key moments” are Intro, Continuous Segments, Spikes, and Dips.
Retention analytics: Key moments
According to YouTube, the key moments will track data at specific time areas in a creator’s videos. Intro will measure how many viewers are watching the video after the first 30 seconds. This should help creators gauge how effective their intros are for particular videos and adjust if retention is low.
Moving on, Dan says Continuous Segments are “a period where the graph is basically flat, and that means no one is leaving the video, so that indicates you have really engaging content.” Dan recommends paying close attention to Continuous Segments. “I would recommend watching that section and kind of thinking about what’s happening there, what can you do with that information to make more of that content in the future?”
As for Spikes, these are areas of a video where there’s an unusually high viewer increase. So this might point to areas where viewers are rewatching or there’s a timestamp.
Dips show unusual decreases in viewership. This would point to areas where people are leaving the video.
When is the update?
All of these tools are currently available in Creator Studio on YouTube. You can use them right now.
Image courtesy: Creator Insider