Last Updated on April 13, 2022
Creating great content is never easy. Perhaps one of the most challenging tasks a content producer is to get and keep your audience hooked to your online videos.
Documentary-style video can be made better by increasing the amount of activity shown in the video content or having animations replace some of the “talking head videos.” Commercial ads can include animations, which have proven to raise the attention span substantially in online ads. There are other things you can do to raise the awareness level of people watching your content.
Retention in video content is of utmost importance when it comes to creating and increasing the engagement level of your target audience. You should also try to analyze what audience engagement techniques are making your viewers drop off or bounce off your site.
Tools to Measure Audience Attention and Engagement
One thing you can do to measure your audience’s level of attention is to use tools to measure the factors that affect their attention span.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great standby for measuring your audience retention rates. It will give you a lot of insight as to how your viewers are responding to your videos, how long they are staying on your page, and which pages are most interesting to them.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is another great tool that will give you a lot of insight regarding your video views and retention rates. There is both a free and paid version, and you can increase your plan anytime you choose. Kissmetrics if a great tool for content monitoring and it gives you insight into lots of different aspects of your content marketing.
Little Things Mean a Lot in audience engagement ideas
Sometimes it is the little things that make the most difference, such as choosing better thumbnail images and titles for your video content. If you can pinpoint the times when your video retention rate drops, you can draw them back into your video by inserting snippets or other attention-getters at the beginning of specific scenes.
Just one little thing you do to grab the attention of your audience may pay off big in the long run.
YouTube Tools
YouTube has many free tools within their platform that let you measure the results of your videos on their platform. You can find out which platforms users use to share your content as well as a variety of other tools within the YouTube site.
Finding what it is that resonates with your followers is the challenge. There are differences in audience preferences so getting to know your audience is the best way to tune into what they are after.
Establish a Baseline
Establishing a baseline as a part of your audience engagement strategies is one way that you can measure the progress of your videos. If you are producing a variety of content, you may want to create a baseline for each type of video. You can do this will statistical tools or again, by using Google Analytics and YouTube to see how certain styles of video are doing with your customers.
Then monitor and adjust your content to fit the needs of your clients.
Conducting Surveys
One of the best ways to measure what your customers want is to send out surveys after presenting certain videos. This can include videos on ad content or even documentaries or training videos. The important thing is to let your customer know that you are interested in what your customers want to see.
For most business owners, they are not in the business of producing a video for purposes of entertainment. The video that businesses produce is usually for the purpose of telling people about their brand or about a particular topic that they want to know more about.
The key to success in your online videos is to deliver quality content that resonates with your audience. Go back to your surveys and customer service emails and see what it is that people want to see. This will give you big clues as to what is happening with your viewers.
Whatever you do, make sure that you have some way to measure your success with online video content. Putting up videos than doing nothing else to gauge their progress is like writing a book without promoting it to anyone.
It’s important to measure the retention rate of your videos.
How to Track it in Google Analytics
For those who are not familiar with the process of tracking your video content in Google Analytics, below are the steps to access and create tracking algorithms that you can use to continually monitor and keep track of your online video ad campaigns.
1. Create a Google Analytics account.– If you have a Gmail account and you have not yet created a Google Analytics account, do so now. Just go to https://analytics.google.com to set it up. Then you will need to go to the “Admin” link and add your web properties.
This is just where you put in your URLs of all of your websites that you wish to track. You can also track videos like this if you have a dedicated page where your video resides. So copy and paste your website URL in this section. Make sure and fill out all of the information Google Analytics asks for here that you want to include about your site.
Remember that YouTube does track individual videos for you and uses many of Google’s tracking mechanisms to show you how your videos are doing. But if you want more robust tools to track video, enter the URL of the video page in Google Analytics. Alternatively, you could add the main site URL instead if you want to track your website more than the individual videos.
2. Enter the tracking code on your page.– If you are tracking a site URL, go down to “.js Tracking info,” and select “tracking code.” Copy and paste the tracking code. Then go to your web server where you edit your site and enter this after the “head” section of your website as HTML code.
This action tells the browser to bring up any tracking information that will later be displayed in your Google Analytics account.
3. Track and analyze data.– Once you have these easy initial steps step up for your site URL where your video is, you can track all sorts of parameters including:
- Time on page
- Entrance/Exit points
- Bounce rate
- Demographics of viewers
These are only a few of the many variants you can track with Google Analytics. This will set it up to where you can observe any changes in your traffic, as well as the overall return rate, new user rate, and many other factors.
To focus more on the video alone, you should use YouTube Analytics which can be found under the Video Manager tool on YouTube. This shows you the exact statistics of your video that resides on YouTube.
I think it is wise to do both: track your site in Google Analytics and track your videos in YouTube since YouTube uses many of the features of Google Analytics to provide the statistics that you see there.
Producing High-Quality Video
Now you know what to do to measure your audience attention. Focus on the “retention rate” in YouTube, which is features within the Analytics feature of the YouTube platform. This will tell you how long people are watching your video and give you an idea of what to do to improve your attention span of viewers.
To produce the best video, see us at animatedvideo.com. Having high-quality video content is just as important as having high-quality articles, blogs, and social media posts. We can help you create a video that will get more views and increase your audience retention rate.
Because you need a great video first before you start tracking it.
