Videos have never been easier to make, to track, or to display on your site, but creating good video marketing experiences remains a demanding task. Luckily for you, there’s now a metric to track that is a measurement of how effective the content in your video is: Average Engagement.
If you take the time to make video content then it behooves you to track average engagement and continue to tweak and improve it based on the data.
Related Blog: 5 Ways to Improve Your Video Play Rate
It’s the metric that shows how much people are engaging with your content. Are they only watching the first five seconds or is everyone finishing the full video?
To find average engagement you first find what a 100% engagement rate looks like by multiplying your total plays by the length of your video. Then, take the total hours played of your video and divide it by your first number. This provides you with a number that represents the average length a person is watching your video which is how long you’re able to engage with a viewer.
A statistic like this shows you that maybe your intro is too long or maybe the video is in the wrong place and needs to be surrounded by different content. Like all metrics, average engagement can make you hear the music but it’s up to you to start dancing. Take the information on your Databox board and start A/B testing and trying new things to bump your numbers to where you want them to be.
Databox allows you to track this stat for all your videos independently to help you find outliers that are skewing your average and get a truer idea of your engagement.
Depending on what the data says, you can optimize your video engagement in many ways:
1. Trim up your video: Whether your putting an email campaign together, writing a blog, or shooting a video, it’s important to keep it valuable, engaging, and concise. Say what you need to say and get out of there, don’t let your audience suffer from running on with information that doesn’t matter to them. This might mean cutting intros or even a clip you absolutely love; Sometimes it may involve “killing your darlings.” Think about what your audience wants and deliver on that.
2. Improve your user experience: An improved experience will keep people’s attention for longer. Things like a better player (branding, colors, thumbnail, etc.) and adding in chapters to help the user digest a longer video.
3. Go with a gallery: A gallery can contain all the videos on a subject making it easier to continue watching videos and keep somebody entertained and engaged.
4. AB testing: There’s no better way to find out what works and what doesn’t. Read the data and try new things to see what sticks and what fails. This process can be arduous but it pays off in the end.
There is no use making videos if nobody watches them, so make sure that they are by tracking Average Engagement with a Databox board. Your audience will always tell you what’s wrong, and metrics are the way they do it.