How to get your viewers watch more than one of your videos?
How to get your viewers watch more than one video so that you can get more views means more watch time, more revenue and more engagement? That's exactly what we need as being a YouTuber, right? It's a goal of a YouTuber to get people to watch one of your videos and watch another one, and another one, and another one. Getting people to watch more of your videos in one session is exactly what we're after. I use this blog as my "YouTube knowledge base" and I want to share with you what I learn on my journey, being a YouTuber.
In-screen elements
This might sound obvious, but you need to create content that's good enough to get people to watch for as long as humanly possible. If the content is good, then they want to watch it until the end of the video. At the end of the video, you can present them with an in-screen element, which is basically the image that pops up on your screen.
It's a clickable link, leading them to another video on your channel that you recommend or that YouTube recommends for them instead.
If you're not making content that people want to watch until the very end, then the very first thing that you need to do, is to check your audience retention reports in YouTube Studio and you need to start paying really close attention to how people are reacting to every single part of your video.
Audience retention reports
Audience retention reports are your roadmap to making good content. The reason for this is simple, because if you are publishing content and you notice in your audience retention reports that you can't keep people watching, then a bell should be ringing, motivating you to start making some changes. But if you can keep people watching, then you know you're doing okay.
At what point are people leaving?
So what you want to look out for, knowing that information, is checking where people are leaving at certain parts of your videos. This can be for example during an intro, or when you're video first starts. This means they weren't impressed or whatever it was, you were unable to grab their attention when your video started. If that's what you're videos look like, you got to get to work on that just very first part of your video! All the stuff that happens after the first part isn't really that important, because you can't keep people watching for at least a little bit of your video. So the idea with the audience retention reports is that you can identify these sorts of things!
Stagnant pieces in your content
Another thing you wanna look out for is just stagnant pieces in your content. Let's say that you notice that you're getting a gradual decline for a period of time in a certain part of your video. Look to see if there's just stagnation going on to where for example maybe there's no cutting, maybe there's no role, maybe there's nothing happening at all or maybe you're not saying anything at all. You're just kind of hanging out there and people are leaving during that particular part. When you notice that in your audience retention reports, that is part of the roadmap to where you can say "Hey, I need to start doing some stuff here during these particular parts of the video in order to keep people watching longer.".
Avoid stopping people from watching
This might sounds strange, but it happens! Caught myself doing it as well. What I mean by this is that a lot of times, content creators will be doing the video and then they'll finish the video verbally or visually (or whatever it happens to be) before the video is actually complete. What they'll do is saying things like "And that's how you do X, Y, Z", or "That's how I discovered this", or "And there you have it!" <-- that's me, lol. As soon as people identify that what they came into the video for is over, you'll see in your own audience retention reports people starting to head out during those particular parts.
This also happens a lot if people have a lot of fluff for a lot of additional stuff they do at the end of their videos. If you notice that in your audience retention reports, just start cutting some of that stuff down and focus on getting people to that next video.
Recommending a piece of content
When you get people to the end of your video, then it's a good idea to recommend a piece of your content to them. It can be one of your videos, it can be your recommended playlist + best for viewer for YouTube. This way you're suggesting something that you think they'd be interested in based on how relevant it is to the video that they're currently watching, or how it makes sense for them to watch that video next. If you use the "best for viewer" slot in your end-screen, YouTube picks what their system thinks that your viewer is likely to watch next from your channel. Doing this, it's recommended that you verbally recommend it, like "Watch this video on the screen" so that you're telling people that this is the next step that you want them to take. This is something I definitely need to work on myself, though. Telling people "this is the next step that you should take" so that you can get more people clicking on that particular video in your end screen, or playlist whichever one it is that you decide.
Concider this!
Before I tell you the next thing, one thing that I want you to consider, is that all the things mentioned above, are kind of the surface level, so that a deeper thing can happen later.
Try to have people from one video go to a specific video next
One of the things that YouTube tells us, is that they suggest videos next to other videos that are topically related, and they also suggest videos next to other videos that people typically watch together.
So what you're doing in this situation (going through the process that I'm explaining to you here in this blog post), is to try to have enough people from one video, go to a specific video next so that YouTube's system can identify that people are watching the videos together in mass, so that YouTube will ultimately end up suggesting the videos next to each other. Hopefully, if things work out perfectly and all the stars are aligned, you'll end up in the "next up spot" on your own content, which means that even if somebody doesn't click on another one of your videos, if they just happened to be sitting back watching, then your video would automatically play next!
Now the idea of getting YouTube to detect that you're having people watch more than one video, one of the things required for that is a lot of views, right? You're gonna need to get a lot of views on one video and a lot of those people converting over into the next video, in order for YouTube's system to really identify that that's happening at scale, right? Now when this does happen, another thing (or as part of making this happen) you can do as well, is pinning a comment.
Pinning a comment
On every single video that you publish on YouTube (as long as your comments aren't turned off), you have a comment section and since you have this comment section, what YouTube allows us to do is the ability to pin a comment of somebody that actually leaves a comment, OR to write out your own comment! That comment, lets people know that "this is why you should go and watch that video", "this is why it's relevant to you", or you can simply just recommend that they watch "that one next" but you want to give a little bit of context so they know why. Basically what you do, is you write the comment and then you paste the link to whatever video or playlist it is that you would like them to watch next! This is SUPER EASY to do!
Put relevant links in your video description
Make sure that you also have links to relevant content in your video descriptions! I should do this as well! The reason that this is important, is the same exact thing that I was telling you before in terms of making it easy for people to find more of your content.
Now with your description, you can take a little bit of a different approach to where you focus on that video that you want them to watch next. Maybe up to somewhere towards the top of the description but then in your video descriptions, you can also add additional playlist links. This leads to if somebody goes into your description, that they can easily find more of what it is that they care about based on the listed playlist that you have placed in your video description.
YouTube cards
If you're not familiar with those:
You can link it to other videos or websites. Here I made the mistake to place the card in the beginning of my video.
The idea is that you can use that option to send people to additional content of yours that
- they care about, or
- that you want them to watch, or
- the content that you just think would make a logical next step based on the video that they happen to be watching at this point in time.
So, when we were talking before about getting people to the end screens, like getting people to watch more of your video for a longer period of time, then in that situation if you have a card at the very front of your video (like I did in the example above - well, guess what? Chances are people are gonna click on that card and then they're gonna go over and watch that video or visit that website but they're gonna LEAVE the current video. If that happens in mass, then it can impact the performance of your video. That's the reason you wanna make sure that you are using your cards in the last 20% of your video.
Mark a "series playlist"
Another thing that you can do, when you're putting your playlist together, is that you put together a playlist of relevant content that is actually made to be watched together and then you mark that as a series playlist.
What's going to happen if you do that, is that you're telling YouTube that those videos are made to be watched together and YouTube tells us that when you mark a video as a series playlist. The idea here is that you're leveraging YouTube's systems in order to work on your behalf, to help people be able to find your content easier!
Consider subscribing to my YouTube channel, and I hope this was helpful for you!
Source: https://bit.ly/3mWmBwl
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