Knowing what parts of your video are engaging your visitors is a good way to know what is drawing visitors in and holding them on and what is not catching their attention. Knowing what makes them stick around allows you to serve up more of what keeps them on your website. The audience retention tool allows you to see how long people are watching your YouTube videos, in addition to what kinds of people are more engaged and who are less engaged. You can see exactly where there interest starts to drop off. If it is near the beginning of the video, you know you have a problem with engagement.

If, however, you only start to see engagement drop off at the end of the video (very near the end, when the main message of the video has already been delivered and you are now closing it out), this usually just means that your visitors are clicking away, looking for something else to watch or have been moved to take action and have stopped watching the video to take that action.

The tool also allows you to see how your audience retention compares to other videos that are deemed to be similar, so you can know if you are doing better than the average video in your same industry or genre or if you are doing worse. Being able to see data related to specific times (for example, people who watch in the afternoon might be more engaged than people who watch at night), can also help you know the right time for uploading your videos.

When views are dropping off in the middle of your video, you can analyze that video, find out what is causing your audience to lose interest, and create videos that are much more likely to hold their attention.