How to Increase Audience Retention on YouTube: Two Tricks

Watch time is the number one ranking so, as a smart creator, you ask: how do I increase audience retention on YouTube?

First things first, YouTube needs to see and understand your video. That’s where YouTube keyword research and YouTube optimization come in.

Next, viewers need to click. So you need a great thumbnail, along with a compelling title and a great description.

Getting YouTube to see and understand your video and getting viewers to click are two important skills. But once viewers click through, keeping those viewers is different skill altogether.

Luckily, there are some simple things you can do early in your your videos to engage viewers and give them a reason to keep watching. As a result, you’ll increase your YouTube audience retention and pull in that all-important watch time on YouTube.

How to Increase Audience Retention on YouTube: You Need a Hook

A great hook grabs the viewer by the eyeballs (figuratively speaking, of course) and gives them a reason to stick around to watch your whole video.

We explore the magic of a great hook in this video:

The Successful YouTuber’s Guide to the Audience Retention ‘Hook’

The basic idea of a hook is that it captures attention early, then pays off as the video progresses.

Breaking down how some of the most successful YouTube creators use hooks (like we do in the video embedded 👆) can be helpful.

The most successful YouTube creators clearly know how to increase audience retention on YouTube, and they use various tricks and techniques to build tension, pique interest, and keep viewers watching, which we’re about to break down for you.

But before we do, one more reason to consider your hook: the YouTube inline player behavior. When a viewer hovers over or otherwise focuses on a video in a feed or search result, the thumbnail you worked so hard to make disappears and a snippet of the video auto-plays.

In this moment, the viewer decides if they want to watch or if they’ll keep scrolling.

It goes without saying, given that we’re talking about how to increase audience retention on YouTube, that we want them to watch.

Interestingly, auto-plays counted as views (at least, they did the last time we dug into the topic) and this is part of the reason you likely see huge drop-offs from the first five to 10 seconds of your video; many of those viewers probably didn’t even click on your video. They watched the intro in the feed but decided to keep scrolling.

The most successful creators spend a lot of time and effort planning and editing their intros. Because they know that when it comes to how to increase audience retention on YouTube, the first few seconds are key.

YouTube Audience Retention Hack: The Cold Open

This is perhaps the most common trick the top YouTube creators use. You’ll also see it all the time on TV, in web series, and even movies.

A great example of the cold open is the first scene in the first episode of Breaking Bad. Walter White (Bryan Cranston), crashing through the desert in his his iconic tighty whities.

It’s the same trick creators like Colin and Samir use when their interview episode starts with the guest saying something surprising. Like Miker Rober in the following video:

The cold open is compelling because it creates a sense of mystery. The viewer needs to know what the heck led up to that moment.

By jumping directly into a climax moment from the story, you motivate viewers to stick around and find out what led up to that powerful (or funny, or crazy, or whatever) moment.

There is no one formula for the cold open but there’s one style of cold open that always seems to answer the question of how do I increase viewer retention on YouTube. That is the flash-forward. i.e. beginning at the end.

For example, if you’re doing a makeup tutorial, a Minecraft build, a recipe, a knitting tutorial, a home DIY video, or just about anything else you can imagine, you start off by showing the finished product and work back from there.

#2 YouTube Audience Retention Hack: What’s at Stake?

There’s another powerful technique creators use in their videos and once you see it, you can’t unsee it… and you’ll start to see it everywhere. Because it works. Its the technique used in the opening 20 seconds of this video from Ryan Trahan. Check out the first 20 seconds of this video and see if you can spot it.

Did you notice? Let’s go back. Ryan’s dad bet he couldn’t survive a sensory deprivation tank because Ryan has a screen time problem, and they agreed whoever lost the bet would face a consequence. Which, if you think about it, wasn’t necessary for the challenge.

He was raising the stakes.

Raising the stakes means introducing risk, impact, or a reward into the story that gives viewers another reason to care about the outcome.

When you raise the stakes, you’re telling the viewer that there’s something to be lost or gained as a consequence of the outcome of the story. Most viewers probably wouldn’t engage a video about a sensory deprivation tank by choice but if there’s a bet involved and the loser has to cosplay as Shrek… well, that’s a bit more compelling.

This video is a good example because it’s subtle. It’s easy to look at a MrBeast video and see the stakes. There’s a lot of money and prizes on the line, but creators like Ryan do this in ways that viewers might not even really notice.