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Analyze This: What You Can Learn From Video Analytics

Do you know who’s watching your video? How long they’re watching it for? Or at what point their interest starts to wane? You’ve put so much time and effort into producing great content, but how can you tell if it’s even paying off? Fortunately, most video hosting services now offer video analytics, helping you answer these questions and more.

Video analytics is offered by most hosting providers so you can gauge how your video is performing, and glean insights from the data. They tell you when, and where, your video needs a little work, and when you can give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done. Basically, they help you make sure your video is doing what you want it to do.

Analytics are great for understanding viewer engagement – the parts of the video your audience is watching, and the ones they are ignoring or skipping over.

Even though your video may be front and center on your site, you can’t tell how useful it is if you don’t even know how many visitors are watching it. The video play rate will tell you how many people watch your video and how often they click play.

Here’s a real world example of video analytics using Wistia and our Demo Duck homepage video:

  • The page with our video has been loaded 70,223 times by 40,806 people.
  • 48% of these people played the video a total of 23,661 times and spent a total of 297.4 hours watching it.
  • On average, they each watched 69% of the video.

To better understand how we performed over the past year, we went back and compared the analytics of our 2011 and 2012 homepage videos.

Here’s what we found:

  • 27% increase in play rate
  • 5% increase in average engagement

Looks like we’re getting better at making videos! We doubled our play rate and increased our average engagement, meaning more people are watching and watching longer.

Before you start tracking your own video, take a minute to consider the following three things:

Your goals – What constitutes success in your mind? Is it conversions, revenue, clicks, referrals, etc?

Your tools – In addition to a standard web analytics package, like Google Analytics, you’ll want to make sure you’re using a video host that offers a robust video analytics package.

What the numbers mean – Know what you are tracking and what the numbers mean. A true understanding of video analytics can give you a real marketing edge, helping you improve your video content and performance in real-time.

With a better understanding of video analytics, you can make sure your investment in online video is having a measurable return. And most importantly, that your visitors are enjoying your new video just as much as you are.

Additional Video Analytics Resources

Written by Andrew Follett
Andrew is the Founder of Demo Duck, a video production agency. He lives in Chicago, loves startups, and enjoys traveling. You can follow him on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.