As I’m sure most of you already know, this isn’t my full time job. Infact, it’s not a “job” at all because I earn no revenue from any of this.
Therefore, I don’t have the time to create weekly videos and all the other stuff associated with it. So, in the last 12 months-or-so I’ve focused on Quality over Quantity in an attempt to reach more people who want to see my content. As opposed to bang out videos to see what sticks.
I’ve recently been trying to wrap my head around my YT Analytics data (specifically Audience Retention) to understand more about my viewers and what they want. And I’m happy to share my findings and thoughts here today.
The Data
This is the audience retention graph of my latest video, How to migrate Magento 2.
It shares a very common trend with most of my other videos, where in the first 30-40 seconds I lose about 40% of viewers. And then it slowly evens out to around 35%.
According to some, I should be hoping for an average retention of about 50%. So, as you can see I’m way off.
Optimising the Videos
This raises the question, “Why are viewers dropping off so quickly?”. Here are my thoughts:
1. Video thumbnail/title isn’t clear about the content of the video or misleading
I don’t think my Title or Thumbnails are misleading, but obviously I’m biased to that. However, I might take some of the spammy keywords out the title and make them more to the point.
2. The first few seconds of each video explains what the channel is about rather than the video
I always dedicated the first few seconds of the video to why the viewer should care about the channel rather than the reason for clicking on the video.
Therefore I’m going to take out the intro and jump straight into what the video is actually about. I’m also going to trim the rest of the intro and spread out the messages I want to get across throughout the video instead.
3. Viewers are unprepared for how complicated the idea of the tutorial sounds
I was watching something last night about how another YouTuber who creates tutorials used to have 50 minute videos explaining everything in detail. But when she turned them into a 10 minute brief, her retention shot up - and the better “expanded” content was moved behind a paywall (subscription/on-off purchase).
I hate the sound of doing this, as it goes against what I believe in. But perhaps there’s something I can take away from this case study… I’m just not quite sure yet.
4. Viewers don’t stick around for the closing comments
Luckily, I don’t drone on at the end of the videos. However, the data shows a small drop-ff in retention. So, I think might cut out the whole “Don’t forget to like and subscribe…” bit from now on too.
Your Feedback
Your feedback is valuable to me, as it allows me to make decisions of tangible information rather than guessing. If you have any thoughts on how I can tweak my videos I’d be glad to hear and implement as long as it strengthens both my core values and YT Audience Retention.
The more we can optimise YouTube, the larger we can grow this community in the hope to help one-another.