Browsing articles tagged with " analytics"

I took a look at video length for businesses four years ago in my post “How Much of a Typical Video Online Is Actually Watched?” and was wondering how that had changed in the last few years.

Some new statistics came out from Wistia, a video hosting company, who also did a similar examination a few years ago into video length. Their findings below bore out the same mantra I’ve been repeating for several years now. Shorter is better.

The above graph sums it up very clearly. In videos 0-30 seconds somewhere around 82% of your video gets watched or roughly 18% of your audience is clicking away from the video. At 30-60 seconds roughly a quarter of your audience is leaving and at 1-2 minutes over 30% are dropping off. The key takeaway here is your business video should be built to serve a specific purpose. The longer you make it, the less people will watch it to completion. So rather than cramming everything about your product into one video, break up that video into snackable content that will keep your audience engaged.

This graph sums up what the audience engagement is in videos of varying lengths. In my original post a few years ago, 10.39% of viewers clicking away after ten seconds and 53.56% leaving after one minute.  What’s interesting to note here is that this number hasn’t changed much for shorter videos, but for longer videos you’ll notice the dropoff is precipitous. What this is showing, is that most of the audience is deciding in the first few seconds whether or not to watch and once they make the commitment, the engagement sort of levels off. The other dip you’ll notice is toward the end when the videos are wrapping up. This can probably be attributed to meandering wrap ups and summarizations at the end of videos.  To avoid this, in addition to making sure you keep your videos brief and to the point, keep your call-to-action at the end of the video direct and to the point. In other words be direct with what you want the viewer to take for a next step whether that is to sign up for a demo, make a donation or to watch another video that takes a deeper dive into the product offering.

I’m usually not a fan of animated GIFs, but this one is pretty cool. What this is doing is visualizing that audience engagement by length of video. The solid orange line represents the average for that video length while the faded lines around it represent the engagement graph for actual videos. What the key takeaway here is just because you make a video short or long doesn’t automatically guarantee you’re going to get the results you expect. There are short videos with incredibly high dropoffs in here and there are longer videos with very high engagement. Making it shorter will increase your odds of watch to completion, however proper script writing to appeal to your demographic is critical to your video’s success. If you are primarily selling to teenagers, don’t write the script in stuffy corporate speak…make sure it speaks to them like a peer would.

The statistics bear out that little has changed since my original post several years ago. Shorter videos are still providing a higher engagement level than longer videos. If you’ve got a lot to say and your message is more complex, consider breaking it down into shorter videos that can be linked together.

Think of your video content like your website. Would you put everything you have to say on the home page of your website? No, because the end user would get bored scrolling down your one page and it doesn’t get them to interact and slowly develop that relationship with you brand through browsing your content. So why should your video content strategy be any different?

Thanks to Wistia doing the heavy lifting putting these statistics together by compiling millions of data points from videos they are hosting over the last couple years. You can read the full report on the Wistia website.

 
 While clicks are not the only key metric for video advertisers, they are one of the easiest to measure. Most video ad goals are some sort of call to action, whether that is to like the brand on Facebook, some sort of social sharing or getting the viewer to take an action like buying a product online; many advertisers still use clicks as the main tracking statistic for specific campaign goals. This may be because tracking after the click can become too labor intensive for small marketing staffs or they lack the understanding of how to measure beyond the click.

So if measuring clicks is your primary measurement and you believe the campaign reached the right demographic, did you reach them at the best time to drive these clicks? TubeMogul just completed a research report to answer this exact question. You can read the full report from TubeMogul with their key findings on their research report “Driving clicks, ‘Likes’ with Video Ads?” Here’s my quick thoughts on the results…

While completion rates do not differ significantly throughout the day, click-through-rates steadily climb during business hours to a peak around 5pm. After 5pm, clicks drop significantly, reaching less than half the peak value by midnight.
 

CPMs for both 0:15 and 0:30 second pre-roll ads show very little variance over the course of the day of less than 10% difference for both video lengths. While CPMs for the two video lengths closely mirror each other over the course of a day, 0:30 second ads consistently commanded a higher CPM than 0:15 second ads.

During the working day between 7am – 7pm, Cost-per-click (CPC) remains very similar for both video lengths. However, as the Click Through Rate (CTR) of 0:30 second ads fall in the evening, CPC becomes more attractive for 0:15 second ads in the evening between 8pm – midnight.

So…what does this all mean?

I’ll admit up front, I’m not a huge fan of pre-roll video ads and TubeMogul also reported in an earlier case study that nearly 87% of unique visitors to a site’s homepage featuring video will never watch a pre-roll video ad. However, in certain circumstances and on select community or news based websites, pre-roll ads can be very successful. I think the biggest takeaway from TubeMogul’s findings is if you are using clicks as a goal, you may want to think about increasing the volume of your 0:15 second ads during the evening hours to take advantage of higher CTRs during this time. To be successful with your video advertising you should be opportunistic with your spend to get the biggest bang for your buck by buying at ideal times. Your thoughts or success stories with video advertising? What worked for you?