With online video consumption witnessing a dramatic rise, digital creators are actively competing for audience attention with compelling video content. To ensure effective video content delivery and boost revenue, publishers and distributors of content require sustainable strategies that enhance engagement and inspire desired actions from the audience.
It's no longer enough to have reach/traffic alone; as a media publisher, you need an engaged audience that interacts with the content you publish, responds to native ads, and buys your merchandise.
One surefire way of achieving video engagement is by regularly measuring video engagement analytics to get valuable insight into your audience's viewing habits. With a weekly or bi-weekly strategy place, you can effectively drive engagement and realize long-term goals of increased ad revenue.
However, with the number of views, playing time, completion rate, and other parameters available at your fingertips tips, how do you determine which specific KPIs matter the most to you? Let's find out.
What are video engagement metrics?
Video engagement metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that give you insight into the success of your video content. They help you determine how your viewers are interacting with the content you publish. For example, YouTube's engagement metrics include likes, dislikes, viewer count, shares, playback completion rate, clicks, etc.
Regularly tracking and monitoring engagement metrics lets you know if your campaign is succeeding or whether it needs further testing and adjustment.
Different brands and marketers have their own engagement strategies to measure performance and align content to meet their broader business objectives. For most companies, this typically means boosting ad revenue, building a subscriber base, generating quality leads, increasing sales, and so on.
But it's not as easy as it sounds.
In fact, 51% of publishers acknowledge boosting video engagement as a huge challenge.
If you are hoping to ramp up your video marketing revenue, it’s crucial to track your performance—and it starts with defining your primary goals and knowing which engagement metrics to track.
What metrics should I track for video engagement?
Let's look at the top 7 engagement metrics every publisher should be monitoring to improve video engagement:
Total Views
Total Views is the number of playbacks of videos, which were started by the viewers. Total views will always be less than or equal to the total number of playbacks that were initialized on the platform.
A low number of views indicates that your video placement is off (irrelevant to the subject of the page) or that your content creatives aren't enticing enough.
However, it depends on how a particular platform counts a view. For instance, for some video channels, 3 seconds of watch time might count as a view, whereas for another, it could be 30 seconds.
Unique Users
This metric gives insight into your true reach; it shows how many unique viewers have watched one or more of your videos. Marketers typically track unique users to get a hang of their return viewer rates, which is important because it allows you to optimize your video content effectively.
Watch time
Watch time or playing time refers to the total time your audience spends watching a video you publish or share. Watch time is the total time a video was watched by all users who started watching it.
YouTube relies on watch time to rank videos in the featured section of users.
Completion rate
One of the most useful metrics of video engagement is the video completion rate, which measures completion against plays. Completion rates of a video are measured as follows - 10%, 20%, 30% till 100%. These metrics provide a more highly detailed view into how long viewers stayed engaged with a video. It helps publishers to optimize video duration and CTA placement by understanding common drop-off points. If all users are watching the video till the end, the completion rate would be 100%.
The completion rate is an excellent metric to determine how engaged your audience is. The higher the percentage, the more invested they are in your video. It is monitored in two ways:
- Playback completed by users
- Playback completed by views
Facebook leverages the completion rate to decide how videos will be ranked in a user's news feed.
Naturally, your goal should be to create videos that are unskippable so viewers stick around till the end.
A low number of views indicates that your video placement is off (irrelevant to the subject of the page) or that your content creatives aren't enticing enough.
Max Concurrent Users
Max concurrent users are the maximum number of viewers watching videos on the platform at the same time. Not everyone necessarily watching the same video. Every user can be viewing a different video and these users can be filtered from a particular video.
By tracking your concurrent users, you can determine your peak traffic hours during the day or week.
Real-time viewers
As the name suggests this metric gives the real-time data of the users that are watching content on your platform in real-time. For example, you can see how many people are joining your live stream and are continuing to watch it (for consecutive minutes or till the end.)
Why video engagement metrics is essential for publishers?
Video is taking the internet by storm; it is expected to dominate 79% of all mobile traffic by the end of 2023. From live streaming and webinars to tutorials and online courses, video engagement has become one of the most effective marketing tools to meet business goals.
Nearly 86% of businesses leverage video as a central marketing strategy, and close to 87% of marketers report success in yielding a positive ROI.
Understanding and actively tracking video insights is the cornerstone of success for video publishers. It provides qualitative data to assess the impact of your video on your audience and boost your organic reach.
In addition to this, it helps you secure:
- Additional revenue: Video engagement has a direct impact on potential ad revenue; it helps you build an authentic connection with your viewers—who then actively engage with your content and are more likely to respond to ads.
- Sustainability and competitive advantage: Since the COVID-19 pandemic has driven online video consumption to an all-time high, every creator, producer, distributor, and publisher of content is actively vying for audience attention—and engagement is the one currency that determines who'll come on top and thrive.
- A subscriber base or loyal customers: Tracking video analytics helps you optimize your content for engagement from new and returning customers. For example, social shares are an excellent indication of brand loyalty and affinity. It helps build brand credibility. A loyal and engaged audience is more likely to sign up for your subscriptions or buy from you.
Conclusion
Video engagement is the one factor that helps you determine how effectively a video is resonating with your audience.
With new-age video hosting platforms like Gumlet that provide you with comprehensive data to determine how your media content is performing, you can effectively leverage video insights to align your video campaigns with your business objectives.
FAQs
1. What are good video metrics?
Some good video metrics are: View Count, Watch Time, Average View Duration, Engagement Rate, Likes-Shares-Comments and Click-Through Rate.
2. What are the top metrics you will measure for YouTube videos?
The top metrics that you will measure for YouTube are: Watch Time, Average View Duration, Audience Retention, Traffic sources, and Impressions Click-Through Rate.
3. Which metrics drive engagement?
The video metrics that primarily drive engagement are Video views, Likes, Shares, Comments, Play Rate and Retention Rate.
4. What is the difference between views and engagement?
Views indicate how many people have seen the content, while engagement indicates how many people interacted with the content.
