Video Engagement: How to Measure and Improve Video Metrics

Countless companies are now using video to market their goods and services. According to research by Wyzowl, 91% of businesses use video for marketing—a significant jump from the 63% found to be using it in 2017.

And it’s easy to understand why. Video excites and engages people like few other types of content. Savvy business leaders know that they can use video to host live events, share educational webinars, demonstrate product applications, and much more.

But how do you know if your video marketing is successful? In this article, we’ll unpack video engagement metrics to measure and share tips to improve your numbers. We'll also cover how to choose a video engagement platform for your business.

What is video engagement?

Video engagement is the practice of holding your audience's attention via compelling content and engaging presentations. It's also an essential metric for marketers to measure and assess the success of video content.

It reflects how long viewers watch your content, how much they engage with your videos, and which conversions they completed. We'll cover specific metrics to track below.

Why does video engagement matter for your business?

Tracking engagement metrics helps you understand how your audience responds to your video content. With this data in hand, you can get to know your target audience better and develop more relevant content for them.

After all, keeping your audience as engaged as possible can help your message resonate long after it ends. This approach can also garner more traffic, clicks, conversions, and revenue.

Gather customer insights and analytics

Tracking engagement data enables your team to customize how you communicate with participants during and after the event. Use customer engagement data to tailor your follow-ups and provide your audience with what they're truly looking for.

Improve retention

Engagement data is also helpful for building customer relationships and boosting trust after online video events. For example, customer success teams can analyze data after a live customer training to identify top questions.

Then, teams can provide top-notch service from the get-go. Whether customers have just purchased your product or they’re ready to use its more advanced features, customer success managers can build a complete engagement funnel with the help of video data.

Build relationships

Building genuine relationships with customers is key to establishing brand loyalty. Use engagement data to identify the most and least engaged participants and tailor follow-ups after the event. Personalize the post-event experience for each attendee and build meaningful relationships with your audience.

Which factors are most likely to impact video engagement?

In most cases, you don't have to wonder why your engagement rates aren't as high as you'd like. Start by considering the factors below, which frequently affect engagement.

Video quality

Low-quality video production tends to leave a bad impression. This content can be difficult to watch and often appears unprofessional. To improve your production quality, invest in one of the best microphones and the top cameras.

Event topics

Subjects that don't interest your target audience probably won't attract many viewers. To improve audience engagement, poll viewers about the topics they want you to cover. Host polls via email, social media, or your website.

Content schedule

When you want viewers to attend live events, it's essential to schedule them during convenient times. Consider your target audience's time zones when planning your schedule. Make replays available for on-demand viewers.

Promotional efforts

If you don't tell your audience about your video marketing, they may not know it exists. Use channels like email marketing, social media, and landing pages on your website to promote events and improve registration numbers.

How to measure video engagement

Some video metrics are more important than others. Use this list as a guide to narrow down the list of metrics that matter most to your team.

Attendance rate

Attendance rate reveals how many people actually attended your event compared to how many signed up. In other words, the number of registrants x 100, divided by the number of attendants, will give you the attendance rate percentage.

To boost your attendance rate, try scheduling events midweek in the morning or afternoon and providing incentives for attendees. You might also want to consider choosing more compelling topics or promoting your event to a smaller segment of your audience that is more likely to be interested in a niche subject.

Duration of attendance

Finding out how long your attendees spent watching your video event and when they left the meeting room can reveal if your webinars are too long or if attendees aren’t interested in certain content. If you suspect that your events are too long, try shortening the timeline for your next event to hold viewer attention.

Registration rate

Your registration rate indicates how well your landing page converts visitors to registrants. To increase registrations, you’ll need to optimize your landing page.

Ensure that your sign-up call-to-action is visibly distinct, and try including a time limit to create a sense of urgency and encourage people to enroll. Simply adjusting the length of your form and reducing the number of fields that registrants have to fill out can help, too.

Poll responses

If most of your attendees are responding to your polls during live events, they’re actively engaged. But if you notice a low engagement rate, you may need to take some additional steps to motivate them to participate. Aim to create audience-centric polls that are directly related to their opinions on the event content.

Chats or comments submitted

Chat messages give you a window into your attendees’ needs and provide important customer insights. If you’re concerned that your attendees rarely utilize the chat function, make sure that your event moderator is actively engaging with the audience to ask questions and respond quickly.

Replay views

The number of views for your recorded event gives you an idea of your event’s overall viewership. While some people might not have been able to log in for the live event, they were still interested in the content.

To boost your replay views, send out an automated email reminder after the event to let registrants know that the replay is available for viewing.

Questions submitted

Seeing how many questions your attendees submitted shows how interested they are in your video content. Higher engagement tends to mean lower churn and and can lead to higher conversions.

Giving informative answers helps to establish your brand as an industry expert. Plus, you can use the information from the question tab to plan out content for your next webinar.

Make sure to explicitly point out the question tab and encourage your audience to use it. Toward the end of your event, you can also block off time specifically for a dedicated Q&A session.

Votes on questions

Are your attendees engaged with each other? Upvote metrics for submitted questions can help you find out.

The questions that receive the most upvotes also reveal what your audience is most interested in learning about during your events. You can use this data to guide future webinar content, too.

CTA clicks

You might use a call-to-actionfor a product download or for an opportunity to sign up for a subsequent event. When you send out a CTA, you need to know how many attendees actually clicked to figure out if you need to tweak your approach to reach your conversion goals.

To improve engagement levels for CTAs, use active words rather than passive phrases. Motivate attendees to click by detailing the specific value they’ll receive from your new offer.

Social sharing

Social sharing metrics demonstrate how many shares the posts about your event received and how many people viewed your event content on certain social media platforms. These metrics reveal your reach across various social media platforms.

To improve your social sharing metrics, ask your audience to share event invites and commentary on their profiles with a custom event hashtag. You can also use tools like Mention, which let you monitor your audience on social media and schedule posts for various platforms.

Email statuses

For many businesses, email is a key part of the webinar registration and follow-up process. Checking email opens and clicks tells you whether your audience is reading your emails and clicking through to sign up for your events.

If you notice that few recipients are opening your emails or clicking your links, revisit your email campaign strategy. For instance, you may want to send out emails at different times, optimize your subject lines, or choose a different frequency. You can also try segmenting your customers and sending out targeted emails to groups with different interests.

Video engagement score

When you want to calculate engagement quickly, use Livestorm's Video Engagement Score™ (VES) calculator. Just input the number of registrants, the number of attendees, the duration of the event, and engagement numbers.

After assessing your video analytics, our calculator provides an overall engagement score and share detailed results. You can use these insights to improve video engagement and host more successful virtual events.

How a video engagement platform can improve outcomes

Tracking impressions, attendees, and engagement is just the first step. To improve these metrics, you need a video engagement platform like Livestorm.

Let's look at a few ways you can engage viewers before, during, and after an online event.

Engagement before the event

• Branded registration pages: Create a registration page with a banner, your company logo, social channels, and speaker's information.
• Custom registration forms: Customize the fields of your registration form to capture audience data.
• Invitation emails & reminders: Create, customize, and send invitation emails and reminders from the same platform.

Engagement during the event

• Polls: Create polls during events and see the answers in real time.
• Q&A: Reply to your audience's questions in the moment.
• Question upvotes: Choose the right questions to answer based on the number of upvotes from your audience.
• Emoji reactions: Invite your audience to react to your live presentation with emojis.

Engagement after the event

• Unlimited replays: Automatically record your event and send it to all registrants to view at their convenience
• Analytics dashboard: Access a dashboard to view your content's performance and engagement data.
• Automated emails: Schedule your replay send to registrants and plan follow-up emails in advance.

How to choose the right video engagement platform

To improve engagement and get more value from your video content, you need the right software. Make sure any platform you choose has the features below.

Promotional features

While most video engagement features are designed to be used during an online event or webinar, some can be used to help promote the event and boost registrations. For instance, you can embed registration forms on your company website, your emails, and your social media pages.

You can also make that registration page work harder and convert more leads by spicing it up a little. Customizable registration pages allow you to add your own color scheme, logo, and branding elements to stand out with potential attendees. You can also customize forms with data you want to collect from attendees.

Email invitation tools can help you import your contacts directly into the addressee field, and real-time email status updates can inform you when your message has been received. Automated email reminders can help you automatically remind your guests about your event, so it doesn’t slip anyone’s mind.

>> Discover how Recruitee uses Livestorm to establish their brand and generate leads

Live engagement features

Live video engagement features keep the conversation exciting and interesting. They also make audience members feel actively included in the discussion.

• Chat boxes allow attendees to share their thoughts with both the event host and each other
• Q&A tabs allow them to submit questions for the host to answer
• Question upvotes help hosts quickly identify which questions are the most popular
• Polls allow hosts to survey their attendees in real time
• Emoji reactions, let your audience join in on the fun and react to what's happening on the screen

Live video engagement features can make things easier on the hosting side of things, too. For example, screen sharing tools allow hosts to visually demonstrate complex ideas, demo a new product, or simply show off recent projects. Hosts can also use video pre-recording features to record sub-videos, product demos, and interviews before the event and play them for attendees during the live webinar.

>> Discover how Freshly uses Livestorm for all-hands meetings and company-wide training sessions

Team engagement features

Some video engagement tools are especially helpful for organizations that serve hundreds or thousands of people—like municipal governments, universities, and large enterprises.

For example,team-wide accounts allow multiple team members to host webinars from a single shared account. Registrant moderation settings allow hosts to grant or deny access to registrants before an event begins, an important security tool that can help prevent “zoom bombing” and similar disruptions.

Registrant records, which keep a detailed history of each user’s identifying information and use history, are essential security features that can minimize hacks and cyber-vandalism.

Reporting features

Analytics tools allow event hosts to gauge things like which moments sparked the most comments and reactions, which content caused attendees to drop off, and which event time duration tends to yield the most attendees. You can use this information to improve future presentations and virtual events.

Plus, video analytics also offer insight into your target audience. You can use this data to fine-tune promotional strategies, select topics and subjects that are most likely to interest your target audience, and even adjust products and services to better accommodate customers.

Livestorm for video engagement

With Livestorm, you can do far more than just facilitate video communication. You can engage audiences, facilitate collaboration between teams, and capture actionable user insights, all in one convenient place.

Ready to start creating more engaging webinars and virtual events? Sign up for a free trial of Livestorm and set up your first event today.