Now that you’ve created your online video, you want to make sure that your storyboard and images are captivating enough to create a good return on your investment.
Making sure that your target audience engages with your message is key to the success of your marketing strategy, and we’d like to recommend our top three ways to test and measure video engagement.
After having invested time and money ensuring that your storyboard and images deliver the strengths and solutions your product or service provides, you can gauge the efficacy of your online video to determine whether you need to go back and tweak certain areas, or whether you can rest assured that it is drawing in the conversions you need for success.
Video Playthrough Rate
This is an analytic tool found on many video hosting sites, such as Wistia, that provides in-depth insight into your viewer’s engagement with your promotional video. Whether you have produced a whiteboard, cartoon, or motion graphic video, it has to have the power and punch to keep your audience watching. If most viewers are only watching first 10 seconds of your online video they are probably not getting the message that you want them to receive.
Video Playthrough Rate allows you to look at exactly how long viewers watch your video, when they drop off, and even if they skip through sections. By analyzing these statistics, you can pinpoint exactly which areas of your video are performing the best and which areas need to be revised.
Take a look at the statistics from our own Revolution highlight reel that has been online for less than two months:
What these statistics are telling us is that in a period of eight weeks, our video has been loaded 1,700 times by 1,500 people, 102% of which played the video 1,548 times and spent a total of 18.3 hours watching it. The graph on the right visually shows at which point our audiences dropped off or rewatched the video.
The next graph shows us the exact time codes of what areas of the video audiences are skipping, rewatching and dropping off, as well as a brief demographic of our viewers. This area also has an interactive function that shows which URL address the user viewed the video (homepage, social media channel, etc.)
Site Visits
Since you’ve undoubtedly placed your promotional video on several different websites and social media platforms, determining how many visits it is receiving is key to helping you understand the success or effects of your marketing strategy. There are a number of excellent tools out there such as Google Analytics, SimilarWeb, and Hubspot’s Marketing Grader that are free and easy to get started in monitoring how much traffic your video is attracting.
A/B Testing
A/B testing allows you to test changes to the placement, size, thumbnails and color of your video to see which version yields the most positive results. By measuring various metrics simultaneously, you have a powerful way to test and measure video engagement. One of our favorites, Optimizely makes it incredibly easy to test multiple variations and clearly understand which version is performing the best.
How does A/B Testing Work? In traditional A/B testing, you have the “A” aspect of your website or video, which is the original, and the “B” aspect, which is a modified version of the original. By identifying slightly altering the different components of your video, you can then see which versions are yielding the strongest engagement.
