This article explains how to better understand how well the YouTube videos in your video ads are performing and how to know what video content to focus on for your audience. 

Before you begin

There are two views available for you to measure your video’s performance:

1. Ads data view: This measures how your video performed when it’s used as an ad.  You’ll see this data quickly after your ad is served to users, with no additional action necessary.
2. Organic data view: This measures how your video performed when users view it in an organic context like search. This view uses YouTube analytics data to report performance, which requires that you link your video’s YouTube channel to your Google Ads account.

Depending on your needs, you can then monitor the following for any of your video ads:

• Audience retention performance for each video (available for both views)
• Video performance and viewer engagement (available both views)
• Percent of views and percent of cost of each video (available for the ads data view)

How to view Audience retention of each video

To see video analytics, click Videos in the page menu, then click Analytics. The top-most card in "Analytics" is “Audience retention,” where you can see the percent of viewers that made it to each second of your video. For the chart, you can compare the performance of your video ad with the content of the video. For example, if you notice that audience retention drops significantly in the first 10 seconds, but your compelling content is later in the video, you might want to consider reordering your content. By making your video content more compelling upfront, people may be more likely to watch your videos from start to finish.

Note:  In the ads data view, there are additional controls to segment data and retention information by ad format. Additionally, retention data in the ads data view is available as of April 2018 for selected formats.  For other date ranges or formats, this view shows “quartiles” information.