Imagine this: Your viewers come across your video and watch it completely, from start to end. Won’t this boost the watch time of your videos? It’s a lot easier said than done. In today’s fast-changing digital world, mastering the art of captivating your audience is a must-have for success on YouTube. As a content creator, you strive to increase the average view duration by capturing your audience’s attention and keeping them hooked on your videos. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of average view duration on YouTube videos and the top secrets to improving this critical metric.
What Is Average View Duration On YouTube?
An average view duration on YouTube indicates the average time a viewer spends watching your video. It helps you gauge whether the content is helpful to your potential viewers or not. It’s simple. If your content is engaging, viewers will spend more time consuming it. However, if it’s boring, they quickly bounce off in between without watching even a second further.
Why Tracking Average View Duration on YouTube is essential?
Average view duration isn’t just another metric but a way to dramatically increase the quality of your content. Here’s why you must track the average view duration viewers spend while watching your YouTube videos.
Opportunites to Improve Search Rankings
YouTube prioritizes ranking those videos that viewers find engaging. For YT, a video with a high average view duration means the target audience somewhere likes the content and finds it valuable. Therefore, it pushes the content in front of more people so that they engage and spend more time on the platform. This improves your videos search ranking organically and helps you get more views on your videos.
Provides Transparent Feedback
How do you determine whether your video is engaging or not? This is where average view duration comes into the picture. It provides transparent feedback to your content quality by analyzing how much time viewers spend watching your video before clicking away to some other video. It helps you spot content gaps in your videos and make them more engaging to strike a better impact on your target audience.
Attract more ad revenues
The more time your viewers spend watching your video, the higher the chances of them watching the ads. The more ads they see, the more money you make from ads on YouTube. So, ensure there is no stone left unturned to make highly engaging content that increases the average view duration on your YouTube videos.
10 Tips to increase Average view duration on YouTube videos
There are a ton of things you can do to improve the average view duration of your videos on YouTube. However, I have shared the 7 most important tips to increase the average view duration of YouTube videos. Remember, this is not an exhaustive list, but strategies worth implementing.
Curious intro with a Compelling hook
What’s the most persuasive statement you can include in the first 30 seconds of the video that explains to the viewer what they can gain if they watch the video till the end? If you give viewers a reason to stay till the end of the video, you probably can make them watch your video for a longer duration, thus boosting your average view duration. A great introduction also sets the stage to reveal your channel’s brand identity.
Edit your videos with a sharp structure
According to industry research reports, the average attention span has reduced from 10 seconds to 4 seconds. So, to keep your YouTube viewers hooked to your videos, stop playing around the fluff and get to the point as soon as possible. Cut the clips that your audience may not find engaging enough. Even 1-3 seconds wasted explaining the fluff can distract your viewers and cut them out from the video. Trimming off such footage will give you a short but compelling video that viewers will likely watch until the end.
Story always Wins
Crafting YouTube videos with storytelling techniques can help you capture your audience’s attention, engage them deeper, and compel them to stay longer on your video. The beauty of a story is that it hooks your viewers emotionally, which is an essential factor to grow your YouTube channel subscribers. Having a great structure for your YouTube videos ensures a smooth flow of content and information and increases the average time a viewer spends watching them.
Optimize YouTube Video Descriptions and Titles
How would you feel if you search for the ‘best places to visit in Mauritius’ but instead land on videos that explain something else? Won’t you hit the close button quickly? That’s exactly what happens if you don’t optimize your YouTube video descriptions and titles. Besides, it also helps you improve YouTube SEO of your videos, boosting their rankings in search results. Thanks to artificial intelligence tools, you no longer need to spend countless hours discovering the perfect YT video title that attracts hoards of viewers. Simply use a reliable AI YouTube title generator and AI YouTube description generator to craft intriguing yet SEO friendly titles and descriptions.
Create a Video that your audience looks for
I understand that you want to create videos you’re passionate about. However, to succeed as a YouTuber, you must create videos that lie at the intersection of what you are passionate about and what the viewers are looking for. Conduct keyword research for YouTube videos and create content around those keywords that the target audience in your niche searches for when browsing YouTube.
Use YouTube Shorts to get viewers to your YT videos
YouTube Shorts can significantly attract a large segment of your potential viewers and get them to watch your channel videos. Viewers endlessly scroll down through a sea of content while watching YT shorts. If they find your shorts engaging and valuable enough, there are good chances that they might explore your channel and spend time on longer videos, thus boosting the average view duration of your YouTube videos.
Post Videos Consistently
Posting videos on a consistent schedule is necessary to keep a higher channel recall factor among your audience. Posting consistently gets your viewers accustomed to a particular pattern. They get used to watching more recent videos on your channel whenever you publish them. Besides, regularly uploading videos from your channel indicates to the YT algorithm that your channel is active and, hence, increases the ranking of your videos in search results.
Include YouTube Chapters
Adding chapters to your YouTube videos helps your viewers get a glimpse of what the video is about and also takes them directly to the part they are most interested in. It ensures they get the answer to their question quickly and efficiently, thus increasing the video viewing experience. This approach is highly suitable for longer videos to increase their average view duration. Besides, it also encourages viewer replays. They can easily skip to more relevant sections and then come back later to explore the entire video content.
Deliver on your promise
Ensure you fulfill the promise you make in your YouTube video title and thumbnail. Nothing is more frustrating for the viewer than to keep hanging in the dark and not deriving the value as promised in the introduction. If you keep your promise, by the end of the video, you are bound to increase the average view duration on your YouTube videos.
Compare videos in a fair manner
Do not judge the average view duration of a 15-minute video with that of an hour-long podcast or other video content. If you want to judge the metric, compare it with your previous videos and see if it increases or decreases. If it is increasing, keep polishing your content for better results. In case, the average view duration is reducing, figure out where your audience loses the connection and improve on those aspects. The most important thing here is to judge a video by its own metric rather than that of other videos.
Conclusion
Once you know the average view duration of YouTube videos, you can gain insights and develop ways to improve your content quality. Implement the strategies above and make some simple tweaks to encourage viewers to keep watching your videos for longer. It will boost the rankings of your videos and potentially attract a fairly larger segment of your target audience. You can find these crucial data in YouTube analytics.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is a good average view duration on YouTube?
The ideal average view duration depends on the type of video content you create. However, for shorter videos under 5 minutes, an average view duration of 2-3 minutes ensures that viewers watch anywhere around 50%-70% of the video. For videos that are 10 minutes or longer, an average view duration of 4-6 minutes is considered decent since the duration indicates that viewers watch around 40%-60% of the video.
Q2. Where can I find the average view duration for my YouTube videos?
Go to your YouTube analytics dashboard and navigate to the content tab. Here, you will see the average view duration of your channel as a whole. You can also look for the average view duration of individual videos.
Q3. Is there a way to increase YouTube views to achieve higher average view duration?
You can opt to promote video on YouTube to attract more potential viewers and increase the chances of attracting higher average view duration. Besides, you can also rely on organic strategies to increase the viewership count of your YouTube videos.
Q4. Why is my average view duration so low?
There is a high chance that your video introduction is not compelling enough to hook the viewers and compel them to watch the video further. Or, maybe, your video editing isn’t up to the mark and the information flow is not smooth, which is why viewers are dropping off in the middle without watching the complete video.