How to Decide How Long Your Video Should Be
What is a Video Engagement Graph?
The value of marketing videos can be hard to measure in specific terms. Even if you know videos are a great asset to your marketing, can you put a number to it?
We ask marketers all the time how they intend to measure the impact of their videos. How do you measure yours?
Most of the time we hear the same answer – by number of views.
This makes us very sad.
Why?
Because raw view count doesn’t tell you anything about the success of your video.
If marketers and business owners are going to really see the benefit of video marketing, they need to be able to measure video ROI in something other than view count, something that has much more meaning.
What your video’s view count doesn’t tell you
What I would much rather know, is not how many people watched the video, but how much of the video did they watch? If your viewers were clicking play, then getting bored or confused, and end up clicking away after 5 seconds, wouldn’t you want to know about it?
Well, the good news is that there is a way to analyse your video views in much more detail. You can do this with a video engagement graph.
A video engagement graph shows you how long your viewers have continued to watch you video. The graph starts at 100% at the top left and goes down from there as viewers stop watching.
No engagement graph is going to show 100% engagement all the way through, so don’t expect it to. Viewers will drop off for one reason or another. Your job as the video marketer is to minimise the drop-off as much as possible.
For shorter videos, 1 or 2 minutes long, having 70% of your audience watch through to the end is generally a good sign. If your video is really engaging, and fits the viewer’s expectations, you might even have 80% or 90% stick to the end.
Sometimes, however, you’ll see you only have 10% or 20% watch through to the end. This is a big warning sign. This generally means there is a problem with your video. It might be too long, or not interesting enough, or just not what the viewers were expecting when they clicked play. Either way, a low engagement score means you have some work to do to make your video more engaging.
Why the engagement graph is more telling than view count
By analysing the engagement graph against other videos, you can see what is performing better for you and what needs to be fixed, and is a much better way of demonstrating the performance of your videos. This is the first step in really showing the ROI of your video marketing efforts.
Here’s an example for you from our own video experience.
We used to have a homepage video that explained how our whiteboard animation services worked. The video was around 4 minutes long, which is long in website video terms, but we felt it told the story in an engaging way and wanted to see how it would perform.
The results weren’t bad, but there was a noticable drop off around 20 seconds into the video. After reviewing the video we noticed that the drop off seemed to happen after the main character was introduced and the next scene started, which gave more information about the character. We felt that the extra information wasn’t really necessary, and it delayed the main message of the video.
We re-edited the video and cut out a large chunk of the middle, including the slower parts, so we were only showing the visitors the bare essentials of the story. The results were great. The sudden drop off disappeared and many more viewers watched to the end of the video.
We found this had an impact on the rest of our website as well, as more viewers were finishing the video and going deeper to find out more, rather than losing interest with a slower homepage video and leaving the website. Our time on site increased and our video engagement graph looked much more healthy!
Are you missing out on this vital information source?
If you aren’t looking at engagement graphs for your videos, you might well have videos that cause people to click play and lose them 20 seconds later, but you wouldn’t even know!
If you’re serious about getting the most out of your videos, you need to know how effective they are at this level, otherwise you’re flying blind, and that’s never a good idea.
If you want to get access to colourful video engagement graphs like above, check out the business video hosting from the guys at Wistia.
Do you look at engagement graphs in your video marketing? Feel free to share your most interesting fact or tip below.
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