YouTube Revamps Retention Analytics To Give Creators More Data About How Their Videos Perform With Viewers

YouTube has redesigned creators’ audience retention analytics tab to highlight parts of individual videos with notable watch patterns.

“The overarching question that we were looking to answer with this feature is, ‘What video should I make next?’” Dan, a YouTube interaction designer who works on analytics, said in the latest Creator Insider video.

He explained that before Oct. 1, YouTube’s Creator Studio offered an audience retention graph, but it was limited. It offered a single graphed line that showed percentage of starting viewership retained (from 100% and declining to zero) across the time span of each video. Creators could tell roughly what points in their videos saw big drops in viewer retention, but not much else.

Now, the revamped tab offers data about four “key moments” of viewer retention–Intro, Continuous Segments, Spikes, and Dips.

Intro measures how many people are still watching a video after the first 30 seconds. 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 said. Spikes are periods of unusually increased viewership; this can indicate that a lot of viewers are rewatching that section of the video, or perhaps someone sent out a timestamped link to that moment. Dips are the opposite–they show a sharp decrease in viewers, indicating “people are leaving the video at about this point.”

All four metrics are useful, but creators should pay special attention to Continuous Segments, Dan said: “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?”

The new analytics are currently available to every creator.