Not surprisingly, a lot of clients these days are asking for help with internet marketing videos. Beyond producing the video, there are questions about maximizing the “engagement” of the online audience once it’s been uploaded to the client’s website.
When evaluating user engagement, the first obvious step is to measure it, and there are several ways to do this. The video hosting service we use, Wistia, gives a number of statistics to assess engagement:
If clients have more than one video on their website, a question that might arise is: “Why is video A showing more engagement than video B?” Unfortunately, there is no way to answer this question conclusively. No matter how similar the videos may be to one another in style, length, or placement within the website, you’re ultimately comparing apples to oranges. In other words, chances are good that it boils down to a simple reason: Video A focuses on a topic that is of more interest than Video B.
So if you are trying to improve the effectiveness of an online video, it’s probably best to measure it against itself. This means, for example, you might identify at what point in your video the greatest audience drop-off occurs. You could then take an educated guess as to why that’s happening and then make changes to your video based on your assumptions. Then you would create a basic A/B test with both videos and see if your revised video shows improved performance.
Changes to the video won’t necessarily mean it will become as popular as the others on the site, but you can, at least, experiment with ways to improve its performance relative to itself.