What's your audience retention %?

[The NotARubicon!]

I'm trying to gauge what a 'good' audience retention rate is so I'm curious what your 90-day percentage is.
My overall 90 day retention rate is 54% - not sure if that's good, average, or bad
What's yours?

 

[adams eats]

Mine is at 31% for last 90 days and 33% for last 28 days. So you're doing better than me lol. I think able 30% is ok. But the more you grow I imagine it will creep up

 

[EVO]

Mine is about 20% at the moment which is pretty poor.

 

[Dave B]

I'm trying to gauge what a 'good' audience retention rate is so I'm curious what your 90-day percentage is.
My overall 90 day retention rate is 54% - not sure if that's good, average, or bad
What's yours?

Hi there,

I'm curious as to why you want to achieve a good retention percentage?

It's hard to tell whether your retention percentage is "good, average, or bad" without any information about video length.

For example;

Mine is about 20% at the moment which is pretty poor.

This could be a very good retention rate in the eyes of YouTube if your videos are generally 40 minutes to an hour long.

On the other hand if you upload 10 videos that are all a minute long then you will probably have a high retention percentage as it is likely that people will stick around for a large portion of that short video.

Also,

Mine is at 31% for last 90 days and 33% for last 28 days. So you're doing better than me lol. I think able 30% is ok. But the more you grow I imagine it will creep up

An increase in retention percentage does not have a relationship with the growth of a channel.

If anything, it is a statistic that you should not focus on. It would be way more beneficial if you focus on average view duration... If you constantly try to increase this whilst paying close attention to your Relative Audience Retention I assure you that your channel will grow.

 

[CaveCat]

My average percentage is actually pretty poor compared to the length of video I put out on a weekly basis:

I average out to 23 percent right now and I make videos that are as long as 15 minutes

Meaning the longest people are on the video is 2 minutes

 

[The NotARubicon!]

I'm curious as to why you want to achieve a good retention percentage?

Because:
1) I want to know if my viewers like and are watching what I am publishing, or if they are leaving after the first few seconds/minutes, and retention percentage is the best way to measure this across my entire channel.
2) Because a high retention percentage directly correlates to a high watch-time whether my videos are 1 minute long, or 40 minutes long.

 

[Dave B]

Because:
1) I want to know if my viewers like and are watching what I am publishing, or if they are leaving after the first few seconds/minutes, and retention percentage is the best way to measure this across my entire channel.
2) Because a high retention percentage directly correlates to a high watch-time whether my videos are 1 minute long, or 40 minutes long.

I have to politely disagree with you.

In my opinion, Average View Duration would be a better indicator of whether or not your viewers like what you are publishing. If you are looking to see if they leave after a few seconds then you need to look at the "Relative Audience Retention".

Also, a high retention percentage does not directly correlate to a high watch time... If I upload 10*90-minute videos and get 1 million views on each, but each view only lasts for 2 minutes I will have a low retention percentage but a considerably high watch-time.

I don't intend to offend, and I hope you find this useful.

 

[The NotARubicon!]

Yes, this is useful. but for now, we are comparing audience retention.. So, what's yours?

 

[Dave B]

Yes, this is useful. but for now, we are comparing audience retention.. So, what's yours?

I don't have an audience retention

 

[PictureFIT]

I have to politely disagree with you.

In my opinion, Average View Duration would be a better indicator of whether or not your viewers like what you are publishing. If you are looking to see if they leave after a few seconds then you need to look at the "Relative Audience Retention".

Also, a high retention percentage does not directly correlate to a high watch time... If I upload 10*90-minute videos and get 1 million views on each, but each view only lasts for 2 minutes I will have a low retention percentage but a considerably high watch-time.

I don't intend to offend, and I hope you find this useful.

I don't think you should be overly dismissive of retention rate. Yes, total watch time is the mighty measurement for a channel's success, but retention feeds more into knowing the extent you need to improve your content. Whether that's improving the quality of the content to make it more entertaining, thus people stay longer, adjusting the length of your content, finding patterns to where people drop off and fixing those patterns, or all of the above. Even though YouTube favors overall watch time, they still pay attention to retention rate. If there are a lot of people clicking your video only to click away a few seconds later, that will work against your rankings and suggestions. If I were to just pay attention to watch time, it doesn't solve much in terms of increasing it. The beauty of retention analytics and the graphs that comes with it is to determine parts of your content that might be causing significant drop-offs. For example, if a large portion of people drop off a few seconds in the video and your content is not click bait, you might want to consider fixing your intro or use a more captivating start to a video.