If you’re using videos in your business and not paying attention to the vital information that analytics is giving you, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity. Watch this video to learn how the right information can help improve your videos.
00:27 – Questions about your Video
01:04 – YouTube Analytics
02:07 – Taking it further
03:10 – Analytic Heatmaps
04:19 – Start Using Analytics Today
Once you’ve made a video and put it out there, this isn’t the end of the process. Who is your audience? How engaged are they? And are your videos getting the desired result? Video analytics will help to answer these questions. Video analytics tracks everything from who watches your video to how they watch it. You can now even find out the effectiveness and success of your video at the click of a button.
Pretty cool stuff.
But the best part about this is that you can use this information to improve your video production strategy, and reduce video production mistakes. By analysing the data collected, you can find out what’s working in your video and what isn’t, and then you can update and finesse your video accordingly.
Many of you will already be sharing your videos on YouTube. YouTube analytics is a good place to start to learn about your audience and their viewing habits.
So, if you go to your YouTube channel and choose a video, click on the button that says ‘analytics’. This page will give you a range of insights into your video. For instance, let’s say you have made a testimonial video production, how many views the videos has had, the number of minutes that the video’s being watched for, and the most popular locations that the video has been watched in.
In the example above, something that really stands out is that the video has clearly had a lot more views from female viewers than male viewers. And you can find other information like how often the video has been embedded on other websites. So, just by having a look at some of this information here, it’s really giving you some interesting insights into your video.
To take things a step further, Dream Engine’s own video hosting gives even deeper insights. For example let’s look at these video analytics over here:
We can see on the graph above what our viewership is over the length of the video, and see exactly where the audience is dropping off, or what they’re re-watching.
So, if you follow the line of the graph it plots our viewership. The point on the graph with the steepest drop-off shows where the largest number of viewers stopped watching the video. It would be interesting to go into the video and watch that point of the video and analyze what is causing that state drop-off, or whether the call to action should be brought in sooner. The red line shows viewer re-watches and we can actually see that if viewers re-watch the video there’s even higher engagement. So, for this video, there’s an eighty-one percent average viewer engagement, which is pretty high.
It’s been watched for 4.7 hours, 133 plays, with a play rate of 94% which means 94% of time that the video was opened it’s being played, so this is giving us some really interesting insights into our video.
In these heat maps, we can see what exactly these individual viewers are watching:
The color codes range from green, meaning it’s been watched at least once, then yellow, to orange, to red on a scale of how much these parts of the video have been re-watched. So, you can actually watch points in the video with the sharpest viewer engagement. By looking at these parts of the video, they can give you clues as to what sections of the video viewers are particularly interested in, or need to watch again to get further information.
You can even track when a particular client watches your video. This information provides a great opportunity for your sales department because it acts as a trigger to let you know the right time to follow-up on a prospective sale.
So the story doesn’t end when you upload your videos to the web. With video analytics, you can continue to develop and enhance your video far beyond its initial release. If you’re a client of ours and you’d like to learn more about how well your video is working, contact us for a free 1 month trial to track your viewer engagement.
Ryan Spanger is one of Melbourne’s most respected and sought-after video production professionals. Ryan founded Dream Engine in 2002, and specialises in helping medium to large corporates, government departments, and the non-profit sector to connect with their audience more effectively by using video.
