Google today announced updates to YouTube Insight’s analytics, adding a new feature, “Hot Spots”, that shows you the hottest scenes in your videos and also what’s not so hot. 

The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. Google determine “hot” and “cold” spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

When the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content’s gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely.

In the example above, you can see that many viewers are not impressed with the dance moves of Michael Rucker, Associate Product Marketing Manager at YouTube; they’re leaving the video at a faster than average rate almost immediately after the video begins. But the longer the video goes on, the more people tend to stay, generating a hot spot at the end of the video.

This features should be a useful tool, especially for people that post videos frequently, because it will let you figure out which scenes are the “hottest” and edit future videos to keep people more engaged.

It could also be used to A/B test different versions of videos. If you’re not sure which edits are more effective, you could upload two versions of a scene or entire video and see compare drop off rates.