Tips to Increase Average Viewing Duration of Your YouTube Videos

What goes on in your mind every time you click on a YouTube link? Ideally, there should be a combination of thoughts-- if you are searching for tutorial, then a sense of hope that you may receive some help, sense of satisfaction if you are looking for some mythological content, some crucial information if you are a geek and looking for any gadget review and many more thoughts, all depending on why you clicked on a particular video.

Any video marketer should have one sole objective while creating YouTube Videos – Meeting the expectations of the viewer. YouTube Videos fall into different categories based on the content, but should answer only one question--Does this serve the purpose of the user’s click?

Aggressive seeding strategy (i.e. placing video links on different websites in order to get more clicks) and strategic disbursing links will get you more numbers on the video but won't help you go viral.

Audience retention metrics of a video content help YouTube search engines to decide whether the content is relevant and needs to be given preference in a search result.

What is Audience Retention?

"Audience retention" is defined as the average viewing duration for your content at channel and Video level.

High average view duration signify that your video is relevant and engaging as viewers are spending time viewing your video content.

High number of views with less duration will drop audience retention metrics showing that the content is not interesting, which will ultimately affect the YouTube Ranking of your video.

Tips to increase Audience Retention:

1. Make it compelling

The content should look exciting in the first 5 seconds to convince the viewer that it is worth it to wait and watch.

2. Build a story

Loop the content creatively to build a story that is engaging.

3. Branding Last

YouTube provides many branding options through various features: Use them and ensure that the video begins with content for which the user has clicked the play option.

4. Thumbnails

Customized thumbnails help in two ways – The user clicks on the video because he gets a glimpse of matching content he/she searched for and at the same time anticipates that specific portion to get the information.

Blend of quality content backed up with keyword rich metadata and tagging will help your video attain the desired visibility and organic success.

Do let us know what tricks you use to keep your video going on.