Videos have always been more effective medium of communication. Studies shows that retention rate of information is 80% for what you see and hear. For hearing it is 10 % and 20% for seeing. Better internet infrastructure has allowed online businesses to use videos as part of the content strategy. According to KPCB1 study, online video will account for 74% of online traffic by end of 2017.
Around 50% of internet users look for product related videos before visiting store2. In education content distribution industry, companies like coursera, udacity have been successful in terms of creating, publishing and tracking such videos for engaging their viewers.
Is Your Video Tracking Exhaustive?
Videos are helpful in increasing user engagement and retention. We should have efficient event tracking in place to measure video consumption metrics. For text or image content, marketers have been measuring user interactions like pageviews, clicks or hover events. For videos, it is not enough to track how many times video was being played. For getting true engagement insights, interactions like play, pause, seek should be tracked. Some of the important metrics for tracking videos on websites are video watch time, total play count, etc.
Use custom dimensions to track Video category, language, genre, total video duration, release date, etc.
Having category, language, total duration as custom dimensions helps in creating custom reports. Comparing user engagement on webpages with and without videos gives useful insights. It helps in deciding video positions on the webpage.
Drawing Actionable Insights
Tracking events on 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% of video help us understand consumption and drop-off rates. We can then decide Ads placement or Click To Action buttons placement accordingly. For example, let’s say we find out that, people leave the website or play another video on 95% completion of movie. This is likely to happen as last 5% content may show movie credits. Then it makes sense to show ads or ‘Click-to-Action’ links much earlier.
There are many analytics tools which help businesses measure user interactions for videos. With over a billion users, YouTube Analytics solution is most popular in the industry. It allows us to track user interactions like total video play, pause,etc. events.
Track Much More Than Basic Events
Most of the analytics tools in the industry track video events like play, pause, seek, clicks on ads, etc. This is where effective measurement plan comes into picture. Considering the business requirements, Tatvic team has developed a solution for video tracking.
Features of Video Analytics Tool by Tatvic
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Actual video watch time:
When user is watching a video, user may pause a video for some time or does some other work and then again resumes play. Or, video is being played on the webpage but user is browsing some other websites in another tab. In such scenarios, metrics like video play count, watch duration will give misleading picture. Tatvic team identified this possible problem. We developed a solution for calculating actual watch duration. It considers special cases like tab switch, pause, screen size.
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PWA Implementation:
Progressive Web Apps are gaining popularity with better performance. Online traffic consumption across mobile has grown significantly over last few years. Tatvic team has implemented Video tracking solution for PWA websites as well.
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Personalized Recommendations of video content:
‘Recommended videos’ feature played a major role in success of YouTube. Similar is the case with Facebook videos. 500 million people are watching videos on Facebook every day3. Tatvic Data Science team has developed a Recommendation Engine. It uses machine learning algorithms to suggest recommended videos.
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Video Players covered:
YouTube, HTML5, Kaltura, JW Player etc.
What’s Next:
Since survey reports4 show that 11% of the global internet population is blocking ads on the web, if you are showing ads in videos then tracking the number of users with AdBlocker tools is imperative. Tatvic has also developed a solution for detecting Ad Blocker scripts which is a universe in itself and we shall be covering it in a separate blog post.
“If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It”
We hope the blog proved to be insightful to you and helped you in understanding the value of having video tracking for your website/app in place. If you have any doubts or are looking for clarifications, please drop in comments and we shall be sure to get back to you.
