Till very recently, you had very little option when it came to finding out how your videos are doing. But in the last year or so especially, there’s been a lot of development on this front.
If you’re running a campaign of any sort where video is going to play a crucial role, and especially if you;’re going to spend a lot of money and resource producing it – and you want to improve on it the next time you do it, it’s absolutely essential that you know what you’re doing right, or wrong. You need to know how users/viewers are interacting with the video in question.
Once you know that, you almost automatically have a list of things that you either want to do again, or NOT do again the next time you produce a video.
At the very basic rung, you want to know how many people have viewed the video. But just counting the views tells you very little. If you’re using a relatively basic video hosting platform, chances are that the “views” only tell you that someone has actually pushed the Play button – but from that point on, you don’t know if they actually viewed the whole video, or just dropped off somewhere along the line. Looking at this kind of information gives you an idea of whether your video is engaging to your viewers or whether they’re just dropping off at some point because they’re bored.
As I’ve found out, a good video hosting platform is crucial before spending a large amount of time or other resource actually producing the video. You want a platform with good analytics reporting, one that will give you as much insight as possible into the interaction between video and viewer. Some platforms such as Brightcove will even tell you whether viewers have rewound the video or fast-forwarded to a particular point – apart from where people have dropped off.
Youtube (in terms of analytics) has Youtube Insights – which is actually not bad considering it’s free and managed. It should be visible when you log in to your account, go to your account, and next to your videos, there’s a little innocuous link that says “Insights”.
Insights also give you…well, insights…into where your visitors are coming from and how they landed up on your video which can be really useful.
If you’re going to show your video on a landing page on your websie, it can be interesting to see how people are landing up on your video landing page and how long they spend on the landing page, and whether they follow any onward links – you can get all of this information from even the most basic Analytics packages these days.
Video is being touted as the new star of online marketing, and if you’ve got any experience in making/producing videos, you’ll know that it takes a lot of hard work to get a product that you think looks right – we won’t even talk about managing the stakeholders and taking everyone’s comments on board.
When something is produced with so much investment, it’s only natural that every aspect of the video be analysed and measured to get the most out of it.
