Audience Retention is a term used to describe how much percentage of your YouTube videos your audience watch. Putting in simple words, it is an average watch time percentage of your videos. It also describes how much people are taking interest in your published content.

For example, suppose you publish an 8 minutes long video on your channel. Most of your viewers watch it for an average watch time of 4 minutes, then your video’s audience retention score will be 50%.

Audience retention score is one of the most important factors to rank your YouTube videos on the top of the Search Engine Page Result on specific keywords. In the real sense, it matters more than your videos’ viewers count and your channel’s subscribers count. And therefore, your videos’ audience retention score should be higher.

The Role Of Audience Retention In Ranking

Several YouTubers ask us “how to promote my YouTube channel?” This is the most common question we usually deal with. Generally, we don’t recommend YouTubers to advertise their channel by investing a lot of money, but we suggest to increase their videos’ audience retention score as this is the most important factor for ranking.

YouTube wants its audience to get quality content and keep watching videos with great interest. It wants to keep its audience associated with them for a long time. And therefore, it’s algorithm analyzes the performance of different YouTube videos. If YouTube finds that a particular video has average watch time of more than 50-60%, then it will think that the video has great content and that’s why people are taking very much interest in it. So, YouTube will itself suggest that video to maximum viewers. And that’s how that video will get millions of viewers and subscribers.

So, the audience retention score plays a vital role in ranking your YouTube videos. You should work on this and improve it by implementing different content producing strategies.

Here in this article, we have compiled the best practices you can do to increase or improve your YouTube videos’ audience retention score. Those are as follows:

Best Practices to Increase Audience Retention 

Make Videos on Trendy Topics 

People love to know about the current happenings in their nation and all over the world. They want to know the deep information about it. If anything is trending in your country or in the world, you should make interesting and informational videos on that. It will be very useful for your channel. However, make sure you put relevant and credible information with facts and proofs on your videos to maintain your audiences’ interest and your channel’s credibility.

For example, if an education-based protest takes place in your country and continues for more than one week. If it is getting media coverage, shared on social media platforms, and becoming a trending topic, then you should make a video on this topic revealing the facts, reasons, demands, and expressing your opinions on that.

This will surely give a boost to your YouTube channel because it will have a great audience retention score.

Keep the Quality High

We always talk about the quality of content because it matters the most. The audience does not want to spend their precious time watching low-quality, irrelevant, and boring videos. They love to watch the highest quality of content. So, make sure you keep the quality of your videos high.

Do not make videos randomly on random topics for only increasing the weightage of content on your channel or maintaining your channel consistency. It will only affect your video ranking because the audience retention will surely go low on this type of video.

Use high-quality equipment and editing tools so that you can produce qualitative content. The more interesting, attractive, and engaging your content will be, the higher your videos’ audience retention score will be.

Keep your videos on the topic. It should not contain irrelevant and boring gossips. If your videos will contain irrelevant gossips, it will only make the audience skip again and again your videos. And this will affect both your channel and video ranking.

Keep Your Videos Light

It is a very very important factor to keep your audiences watching your videos. Generally, heavyweight or high MB videos load very slow on the internet. And if they load then they buffer again and again if the internet connection is not a high-speed internet. Audiences do not want to wait for too much to watch a video on YouTube. If they find that a particular video is taking too much time to load or buffering again and again, then they prefer to skip it and watch other videos. Therefore, it is very important to keep your video light.

For keeping your videos light, you can use different video compressor tools. There are so many free and paid video compressor tools on the internet. You can choose any of those as per your choices. For getting better results and avoiding quality compromise, use paid video compressor tools.

Interact and Engage Your Audience Using Different Strategies  

As a YouTuber, you are a star and your audience are your fans. You need to interact with them so that they can remain engaged with you. And if they will be engaged with you, they will surely watch your videos to the end. And that’s how your videos’ audience retention score will be higher.

Responding to comments is one of the best ways to interact with your audience. You should respond to every comment that appreciates your effort or criticizes your content gently. You should also make particular videos in which you can respond to selected comments. This will surely work for you.

Another way to interact is to get personally connected with your audience. Reveal some interesting stories of yours, your daily routines, and your experiences. This will engage your audiences and it will result in getting higher audience retention.