- Hello insiders, today we're going to talk about
a new feature in YouTube analytics, to help
you better understand your video retention
on a totally new level.
Today I'm gonna speak to Dan, who's working on this feature.
Dan, do you wanna introduce yourself?
- Absolutely.
Hey, Lena.
My name is Dan,
I'm in interaction designer, on studio, and specifically,
I work on analytics.
- Cool, tell us a bit more,
why did you decide to launch a new audience retention card
and what is the difference with the old one?
- [Dan] There is an audience retention graph today.
But for one thing that only exists at the video level.
There's not really a great way other than going
into individual videos to compare audience retention
across them.
Additionally, it's not very visual and it can be difficult
to interpret what that means for creator.
We wanted to pick out some of what's happening
in that graph, in that line, that it's describing,
and surface those, moments, key moments is what
we're calling them, for different videos.
We're doing this at the channel level,
as well as at the individual video level.
- Okay, so what are those moments?
- We've picked out four key moments
and naming these was really hard,
we went back and forth a lot on the names for these
but we ended up with, as the intro,
the first 30 seconds of the video
and we know that's really important
cause that's your chance to hook viewers.
We're ranking that by the number
of people still watching after 30 seconds.
Secondly, we have continuous segments,
which is when there's a period when the graph
is basically flat,
and that means really no one is leaving the videos,
that indicates you haven't really engaging content there.
Spikes and dips are the last two.
A spike could mean a couple of different things,
it could mean either people are rewatching, that section,
or there's a timestamp there,
and viewers are getting linked to that point.
A dip could mean a number of different things typically
that people are leaving the video at that point
where they're skipping over it.
- This sounds really interesting, and do you have any tips
about how creators can use this data?
- Sure, definitely.
We almost called this card "Highlights",
we went away from that because that implies good things
are happening and these aren't necessarily always good.
For example, if there's a spike people are rewatching
a section, that could mean that it's a more engaging moment,
or people think it's funny, or they wanna see it again
but it could also mean that the audio cuts out,
or there's something happening in the background that people
are distracted by.
What we're hoping is that by surfacing these key moments,
and especially at the channel level, creators
can look across their videos and see what notable things
are happening and find patterns in those.
For continuous segments, those the longer they are,
the better they are.
We've ranked them from longest to shortest.
If you have a really long continuous segment
of viewers watching that typically means
that's really engaging content.
I would recommend watching that segment and kind
of thinking about what's happening there,
what can you do with that information to make more
of that content in the future?
The overarching question that we were looking to answer
this feature is, what video should I make next?
Hopefully, with this information creators can say, Okay,
now I kind of have a sense for what's resonating
with my audience, what they find really engaging
and I can do more of that in the future.
- All right, I have, very last question.
Can everyone see this card?
- Everyone should be able to see the card.
The videos show up are your most recent
and if certain videos don't meet the criteria, for example,
they have to be at least a minute long,
I think, and a few other criteria.
They won't show up in the list necessarily.
- Do you have any questions for Creator Insider audience
then?
yes, kind of an invitation to weigh in
on where this goes next.
We're really excited about this.
We think it has a lot of potential for creators,
but also we know that we can do a lot more with this
and take it in a lot of different directions.
We'd love to hear from folks what they wanna see next.
We are excited to hear from them and incorporate
that feedback into deciding what to do next with this.
- Thanks for coming to the show then.
- Thank you.
- Try the new feature, leave your feedback and keep it real.