Do you know what is more important than your view count? Yes, user retention is that important feature of YouTube. It is even more important than the view count. Because your view count simply shows you an estimated number of viewers means how many people have clicked on your particular video and are watching it.

So, in general, it shows the total number of video views on your channel. But user retention is much more than this. User retention tells you how much a viewer watches your video before even clicking on it, and this is the most important statics you should know about your video.

What Is User Retention?

Now you have some idea about the importance of user retention, you might be wondering what user retention is? Basically, user retention which is also known as “Audience or Viewer Retention” is the average percentage of a YouTube video that people watch. Videos that have high user retention have more chance of becoming visible on YouTube and thus showing more in the search results.

For example, you have published a 5-minute video and viewers watch your video for 2.5 minutes, your audience retention on that video is 50%.

The most important thing about user retention is it highly affects your video rankings on YouTube. A certain video is ranking high on YouTube just because that video has high user retention rate than the other videos of the same category. That’s the reason videos with higher user retention get more overall engagement and thus earn more revenue.

What is a Good User Retention?

If you look at YouTube, it will tell you that good audience retention is about 50%. But, it doesn’t mean that this is a fixed number, it may change with the change in different user retention factors. So, high user retention determines your video rankings and plays a major role in your video engagement. In addition, you should enroll in this Youtube SEO course with a 30-day money-back guarantee. It will help you a lot in increasing your youtube subscribers.

Strategies to Increase YouTube User Retention

1. Add Visuals and Graphics

The first and important strategy is to use visuals and graphics in your videos. Adding visuals and graphics to your videos is a perfect way to attract more people to your content and encourage them to click on it.

People are more interested in images and videos rather than text as they make a clear impact in their minds and keep them engaged for a longer time. Moreover, adding some graphics and animations keep their boredom away and builds their interest in your videos. It also helps the viewers to understand your video concepts in a more easy way.

Looking for some cool apps to create eye-catching graphics and animations?

You can use Canva for this purpose. Canva is a free tool with millions of templates that best fits your needs and organize your video content by creating amazing graphics and visuals.

2. Use a Compelling Hook

It is very easy for YouTube viewers to click on a video or leave a video and click on ‘’Next’’. They can actually decide it within a second. In fact, according to YouTube;- the first 15 seconds can make or break your entire video. So, make sure to kill your video in the first 15 seconds so you can grab the audience’s attention quickly and thus increase your user retention. To make it more convenient, I have this effective blog post here.

When building your YouTube channel, you have to be careful about your video structure and content. Choose what your people mostly like and take interest in. Try to catch their attention at the very start of your video so they can believe that the rest of the video would be according to their expectations. Surprising your viewers with something exciting is another great way to increase your user retention. You can share a tutorial, an unseen picture or video, or something funny.

Whatever you upload, make sure that it catches the viewer’s attention from the start and they love them. Now, it does not mean that you have to produce unique content all the time, you have to give people a great hook that will keep them engaged till the end.

3. Make it as short as possible

Making short videos are more preferred than longer ones because a short video of 1 or 2 minutes builds more user retention than a video of more than 20 minutes because it is not that hard for people to watch a shorter video of 1 or 2 minutes. But, it does not mean that you should always create short videos. Short videos are good for those YouTubers who have something quick and simple to show while most gaming and podcast videos are more than 20 minutes because the viewers of such content want to see the end result. So, choose your niche and focus on it so you can increase your user retention easily.

Why is Audience Retention Important?

In simple terms, audience retention is important to build your channel high on YouTube because YouTube loves those videos that people keep watching for a long time.

In fact, when YouTube did a slight change to their algorithm a few years ago they clearly confirmed that audience retention also plays an important part in video rankings along with other ranking factors and that they have seen that videos with high audience retention tend to show more overall potential in YouTube search and suggested pages.

Conclusively, user retention or audience retention encourages the viewers to like, share or subscribe to your video and makes YouTube believes that you have pretty good content to publish and people want to see more from you.