Retention and Skip Rate: the new reels metrics to identify audience loss moments

Instagram has introduced two new metrics to enable creators to gain more detailed insights into the performance of their Reels: Retention and Skipping Rate. These provide valuable information regarding the moments when a piece of content loses the audience’s attention and interest.

This series of new Instagram metrics are in addition to the updates introduced at the beginning of the month, which included, for example, Reel Like Insights—a metric that makes it possible to identify the exact moment when users liked a reel.

 

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What Retention and Skip Rate reveal

First, the Retention metric consists of a new interactive chart available in the Reels Insights section. This chart shows the percentage of views corresponding to individuals who have continued watching your reel at each moment of its total duration.

This means that this chart will always show a downward trend, since the number of people who start watching will always be greater than the number who finish viewing (only in an ideal scenario would these numbers be equal, and never greater). However, as Instagram notes, the key is that “the flatter the line, the more engaged your audience is.”

The moments where the decline in views is most pronounced will provide you with clues about which parts of your content are losing viewers’ interest.

The other new metric that Instagram has integrated into its Reels analytics is the Skipping Rate, which will replace the View Rate. While the View Rate displayed the percentage of users who watched a reel beyond the first three seconds, the Skipping Rate indicates the percentage of users who left the reel during the first three seconds.

“A high Skip Rate indicates that people did not find the beginning of the reel engaging, whereas a low Skip Rate allows you to understand that your hook—or the first three seconds of the reel—resonated and kept people watching,” Instagram explains.

Photo: Instagram