Video Analytics Dictionary

81% of businesses in the US use videos as a marketing tool.

What catapulted video to the top of the marketing food chain is video analytics.

If you are in any way involved in marketing, even if is in a limited capacity, you would benefit considerably by acclimating yourself to core concepts and terms relating to video analytics.

Video hosts, such as Cincopa, enable marketers to see who is watching, how much of the video they are watching and whether the specific viewers return to watch the same video.

“Successful marketers view video the way it should be; a powerful lead generation and conversion tool.”

 

So, without further ado, here are the essential video analytics terms and concepts that marketers should familiarize themselves with:

analyticsEvents

Events are simply defined as user interactions with your video. These include how long the video is watched on average and where the largest drop-off point for the video is. Events are important because they help a business know how to effectively adjust their videos to meet their viewers’ demand. For example, knowing most people don’t watch videos to three-quarters the way through may lead an individual to shorten their content or make it more engaging.

api

API

If tech acronyms deter you, fear not. You probably won’t have to interact with an API (application programming interface)  if you don’t code. However,  It’s important to understand the concept so you don’t get lost when it is brought up.

An API is what sits between your application and any other application that you probably don’t own but still need to interact with. An API is important if you need to harvest data regarding the way in which users viewed your videos, for instance. You can then use the harvested data in more complex computations than the platform you depend on allows.

Alternatively, if you need to collect data from the different platforms you use and compact them in your home-coded platform, you’ll interact with APIs. Of course, most established platforms like YouTube and Cincopa offer open APIs for further data analytics.

metadat

Metadata

Video metadata refers to any additional details you may have to add regarding a video, other than the content itself. For example, metadata on YouTube might include the title and description of the video. On a hosting platform like Cincopa, this might include the tags you attach onto the video.

Metadata is important because it helps with video SEO. Since search engines can’t search the content of your video itself, it helps if you give them information on what yours contains.

metadata

Drop-off Rate

Drop-off rate refers to how long, on average, your viewers watch a video before turning their attention to something else.

On a conceptual level, drop-off rate is relatively straight-forward and easy-to-understand. However, it’s a lot harder (and arguably more important) to find out why  you have a high drop-off rate. Your content might be too long, not engaging enough or even too heavily branded. In this case, analyzing a few other metrics like average engagement might help. Cincopa experts advise observing moments just before the drop-off point. Chances are, whatever the viewers saw turned them off.

A feature unique to Cincopa is Video Heatmaps. Here’s how it looks:

video heatmaps

Through a constantly updated graph, you will be able to see your viewers’ drop off patterns. As you can see, most viewers stay for the first few seconds. Then, not so gradually, the number begins to drop. This will give you a good indicator as to what point in the movie led most of your viewers to lose interest.

Channels

A channel is the platform the video analytics data originates from. For example, if you upload a video to Cincopa and embed it to your blog, the blog is the channel. If you instead decide to post it on Facebook, the analytics data originates from Facebook and it is now the channel.

Analytics channels are important because almost no business gains relevant data from just one platform. If you can have all these metrics combined on a single dashboard such as Cincopa, the better.

Play Rate

Play Rate refers to the number of people that click on your video as compared to the number of people that loaded the page.

It’s important to note that like with all other metrics listed on here, play rate is measured differently depending on the platform. The most efficient of these is the one used by Cincopa. Rather than using page loads, it uses the number of people that scroll down to your video, in the case the video is not the hero on your landing page.

As you might have guessed, video play rate also gives you a good idea of whether the video has been placed in a suitable area of the page or not. This doesn’t count for autoplay videos.

create your own private video channel on your website

Average Engagement

Another metric whose measurement greatly differs depending on the platform is engagement. It is generally considered the most important factor in video analytics data and varies so much depending on the platform that it doesn’t have a central definition.

A reliable way to think of engagement is the number of viewers that watch your video and don’t just tune out in the middle of it. This may be measured by factors such as how many people liked (or disliked) your video, how many comments were left and social media shares. Professional platforms like Cincopa use a certain degree of all these factors.

Total plays

Finally, total plays refers simply to the number of plays your video has had. Depending on your platform, this might be across different channels on just a single one. What differs across said channels is how ‘a play’ is measured. On YouTube, it’s counted as seven seconds of playtime, on Facebook it’s 3 seconds and on other platforms, it’s not really defined.

Here’s how it looks using Cincopa’s dashboard:

Cincopa

Teams tend to be overly concerned with this metric, and it may be of great importance to a business looking to expand reach, for instance. However, it shouldn’t be used on its own as a measure of the effectiveness of a video. Engagement and CTR are other factors that shouldn’t be left behind.

Originally published on September 5th, 2019, updated on September 18th, 2019
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Video Analytics Dictionary

by Tomer Iserovitch time to read: 4 min
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