How to Use Engagement Metrics to Make Better Videos
uStudio | Media Management
Counting the number of views that a video receives is one way to look at how a video is performing. It should give you a very strong sense on how many people have watched a video and (of course) an exact count of how many times that video has been played.
Users of online video have long used the view count to measure the success of a video. However, that only shows you one dimension of how a video is performing.
That’s where engagement comes in … how long are people watching that video?
In the above graph, you can see that the video, “An Introduction to uStudio” has 1431 views. Depending on the time frame of the data you’re looking at, that might be good or bad. However, looking at the rest of the graph gives great insight into how the video performs, overall, to the audience.
You can see that 808 people watched 80% of the video. That’s not too bad. A video that has 75% of people still watching around 60-80% of the video can be considered successful – having 100% of people watch 100% of a video is generally an unrealistic expectation. In this case, it’s a little lower than this so it would be good to dig in and see what else we can learn from this video.
The video begins with 1431 views, by 20% of the length of the video there are 1385. Not bad, that happens. However from 20% to 40% there are over four hundred more viewers that stop watching. That’s the first significant drop so far and it’s worth investigating.
What’s happening at this point in the video? Is it slow? Confusing? Boring? In most cases, the issue with the area in question is fairly obvious. As a video producer, or someone collaborating or coordinating a video production, you can take that insight into the next video or revise the one you’re evaluating.
Engagement data can also show places in a video where the audience is jumping back to watch something again. It’s important to understand why. If it’s because something is confusing, you can fix it. However, if it’s something that people liked (a funny moment, for example) you can use this insight to keep doing the right thing.
The point is, publishing a video is not the final step. Once your video has been out in the wild for a time, look at the metrics like views and especially engagement to learn what is working and what isn’t. Either recut the video to make it better or use your new knowledge for to improve future videos.
