With digital workplace transformation now a competitive necessity, video has become the most important form of business content – now and for the foreseeable future. As the volume of video in enterprise environments grow, so does the need to manage video content in a centralized portal, as well as the need for online video analytics tools to monitor and track video consumption across the organization. Luckily, those two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Understanding Video Analytics

VIDIZMO, a Gartner-recognized enterprise video management solution, offers data-driven insights into both ends of video analytics:

A) Video analytics: How videos are being consumed, how the content is performing, and how users are engaging with it. 

B) Media analytics: How the portal as a whole is being consumed, how users are engaging with the content, user experience on the portal and top media and users. 

C) Media Quality of Experience (QoE): What kind of video streaming experience the end-user is receiving, and more specifically, how reliable is the data transmission network. 

D) Livestream analytics: How many people view livestreams.

E) Interactivity reports: Users’ responses to surveys and quizzes embedded in videos.

F) Federated analytics: Analytical data gathered from integrated third-party applications such as CMS, LMS, CRM etc. alongside media analytics from VIDIZMO, presented from a centralized VIDIZMO analytics dashboard.

Video Analytics

The biggest advantage of video, from a data standpoint, is that it is a centrally hosted medium, meaning that information about content consumption can be tracked centrally. This enables a business to use that data to optimize content, update it wherever it has been published, and keep testing for continuous improvement. With online video analytics tools, a business stays better informed on how existing assets are performing and how future content decisions should be made.

For instance, if only half of your viewers are making it to the end of a particular video, you need to reevaluate the length and content of the similar videos in the future to better engage viewers. You can track viewer drop-offs in the VIDIZMO Media Analytics dashboard via the heat map widget:

The widget tracks 5-second chunks of content and displays the heat map timeline, as seen in the screenshot above. This data can also be viewed in tabular form, as can every other analytics widget available on VIDIZMO dashboards:

From the data above, it appears that the ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ video is doing reasonably well, with no drop-offs until the concluding 5 seconds. Views are picking up around the 25-second mark, making the next 10 seconds the most important part of the video. For optimization purposes, we could look at the content covered from 00:20 – 00:30 and expand on it, because users seem to be most interested in the information at this point. This is the sort of insight a business can uncover using VIDIZMO analytics, focusing on providing users actionable data to improve business video consumption.

There is a lot more information in the Analytics dashboard, apart from the heatmap. All the analytics go hand in hand and together paint a complete picture of viewership. You could say they act as pieces of a puzzle. This information includes the following:

Total number of views and viewers 

The number of total views and unique viewers in an online video analytics tool gives a look into how far across your video content reached. This would be helpful when you expect a certain number of people to watch the video. For instance, if you broadcast a company-wide announcement for all your employees, you can tell whether all your employees watched the video or not by tallying the number of viewers with the number of employees. 

Number of Impressions

Impressions are when the video page was loaded and doesn’t count video playback. It only counts the number of times the link was opened. Together with the number of views and viewers, this number would tell you how many people opened the video but didn’t watch. This could be for one of many reasons such as the video wouldn’t load, or the network disconnected.

Completions

The number of completions in an online video analytics tool reports how many viewers went through the entirety of the video. Again, when paired with total views and viewers, it gives a complete picture of how many of the viewers actually completed the whole video. The aforementioned heatmap widget would show you exactly when viewers who didn’t complete the video dropped off. Using this insight, you can analyze why viewers didn’t go through the whole video.

Total time played

This metric represents the total time, in minutes, that a video was played, compounded for all the views, regardless of completion. In other words, this metric reflects the video’s playback in length of time.

All these metrics are shown plotted against time on a graph or in a table, which makes for simple and convenient trend analysis by showing how the metrics change over time and the peak time of viewership. Such actionable insights can be used when planning future videos of similar nature. 

Likes and comments

Likes and comments on a video suggest how compelling the content of the video was found to be by the viewers to drive them to interact with the video and leave a feedback. Comments don’t necessarily have to be a feedback. They could, for example, be questions. But regardless of what the comments say, the mere act of leaving a comment reflects how well the video was received and the content digested.

Top Devices

Since VIDIZMO is adaptable over a range of devices, viewers can choose which device they wish to view a video on, based on their convenience. A bar graph in the analytics represents which device – desktop, mobile or tablet – the video had the most views, impressions, completions and time played on. This would be helpful in optimizing the video for the most popular device. 

Similarly, a pie chart represents the popularity of web browsers, which can also be viewed in tabular form. 

Number of embeds

Some users embed videos on other websites or applications, such as social media platforms or websites, to reach a certain audience. A pie chart would reflect all the places the video was embedded, with the URL of those webpages, which helps contributors consider the audience on those webpages when making similar video content in the future. 

Demographics

A geographic heatmap would reflect the popularity of the video geographically. This data could help in making the video more accessible for the areas that the video didn’t do well in by expanding the distribution network or offering additional language settings. 

Media Analytics

VIDIZMO also comes with aggregated analytics available on all the media in the portal. Some of the information is the same as that given on individual videos, except summed up for all the videos. Plus, the portal’s Report Dashboard also gives a set of unique information which includes:

Total views

Similar to individual video analytics, the total views in an online video analytics tool represent the overall views of your portal, broken down into 2 statistics: views by registered viewers and views by external, anonymous viewers. You also get a look at how many individual, unique viewers watched the media on your portal. Once again, you can tally this number with how many views you expected to evaluate how far across your media reached, within and outside your organization. 

Top media, contributor & registered user

A list of the top media arranges all the media uploaded into your portal in order of the views it received, most to least. This gives you a look into your most popular videos and you can analyze why it did so well and how you can design other videos to be similarly received. It could be because of an attention-grabbing title, an eye-catching thumbnail, or just a popular subject matter that more people are interested in.

Another list of top media arranges the media in order of most interactions – likes, favorites, comments, shares and downloads – which gives you a look into which of the videos was the most engaging. Users could be engaged by the subject of the video, its delivery or a multitude of other factors that you can evaluate based on this statistic.

Similarly, a list of top contributors simply shows which contributors uploaded the most videos in your portal and top registered users shows which users showed the most interest in the content.

Media summary

A media summary table gives an overview of each video in terms of impressions, views, completions and time played. You can use this table to sort the data in ascending or descending order and analyze the different ratios, such as impressions to views or views to completions to evaluate the performance of your video or portal. 

You can also view this table in terms of interactivity – likes, comments, favorites, shares, downloads and embeds – to further evaluate which of your videos was most and least engaging and why.

User summary

With the user activity summary table, that shows the impressions, views, completions and time played of individual users, you’ll be able to gauge which of your users had the best and the worst experience with the portal by analyzing similar ratios as in media summary. 

Just as with media summary, you can view the table in terms of interactivity as well and see which of your users was most engaged with the portal media.

Total favorites and shares on the entire portal

The portal’s online video analytics tool gives a number of total favorites and shares as well, which represent the total number of times the viewers interacted with the video by pressing the favorite button and sharing it with their colleagues. This can help you gauge the overall popularity of the content on your portal and you can tally the number with an estimate made earlier to evaluate if you’re meeting, exceeding or falling behind expectations.

Recent activity by users

Recent activity gives you a transparent view of users’ activity on the portal, such as likes, comments and shares. The activity is shown for the period that you select to view the analytics for. You can use these updates to keep track of what’s happening on your portal and to respond quickly to any activity that may require your attention. For example, if a viewer asks a question in the comment section of a video, you can see it and respond promptly. 

Portal statistics

Aggregated numbers representing downloads, embeds and forms submitted can be viewed which you can use to understand how many times your portal’s media was taken to offline or on another webpage, such as social media and how many times the surveys and quizzes you uploaded to the portal were taken. 

Interactivity trends

A trend of interactivity with the portal – favorites, shares and downloads – can be viewed in graphical or tabular form in the online video analytics tool, which would help you analyze the point in time at which your portal engaged the most viewers. Time can be days, weeks, months or years, depending on the period you select to view the analytics for.

Feedback summary 

Feedback summary represents the number of queries or concerns you received regarding the content on your portal, over time. You can check this data to see if the concerns decreased in number when you’ve addressed them. 

Besides analyzing content consumption, you can also look at how your media is performing from a network standpoint with the VIDIZMO Media Quality of Experience (QoE) dashboard, or request a live demo of our video analytics.

Media Quality of Experience (QoE) Monitoring

In an era where people spend more time connected to digital video than interacting physically with others, ensuring the best streaming experience in your business is mission-critical. Video quality can degrade or get interrupted at any point across the transmission path. This could translate to frequent buffering during playback, device-specific errors, or low quality playback experience. You need to know exactly when and where these issues occur to take corrective measures or implement failovers. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker.

In a State of Online Video report, we see that 78% of the total 1,779 survey respondents reported that they will stop watching a video if it buffers more than 3 times during playback. The full chart can be seen below, depicting the number of times respondents said they’d let the video buffer, before abandoning it.

For a business, this means that if there are issues in the network that lead to buffering, data suggests that consumption will fall. This decreases the value of your content, directly impacting the ROI you had hoped to drive from your enterprise-wide video strategy. VIDIZMO offers an online video analytics tool that allows you to measure average buffering during playback for any video in the QoE dashboard so you can analyze and optimize your videos and ensure that you amplify the success of video initiatives in the business.

Here are the 3 types of analytics you can use to measure buffering within the VIDIZMO QoE dashboard:

Device buffering heat map:

Information that can be seen in the VIDIZMO Media Quality of Experience (QoE) dashboard includes:

Time played

Similar to the time played metric in video analytics, the time played figure shows the consumption of the video in length of time. Depending on the period defined, this can be in seconds, minutes or hours. 

Player load time

The average time taken to load the first frame of the video is helpful to understand how long a video generally takes to playback. This is shown in a bar graph and represents how long the player takes to load on an internal as well as an external network. You can use this information to evaluate the efficiency of your network and analyze potential problems. 

Cache hit ratio 

A pie chart in the online video analytics tool represents user requests received by Origin and Edge servers across the network. The chart illustrates the proportion of internal and external viewers on a video. If a video is more popular with external users accessing the video content through edge servers, you may want to expand your delivery network to accommodate more viewers in the future for similar videos or analyze why more internal viewers are not watching the video.

Buffering 

You can see how much the player stopped to buffer as a percentage of the video’s run time. This metric is an average of all the viewers’ experience and is also presented broken down for devices. As shown above, a bar graph reflects how much the player buffered on desktop, mobile and tablet and a geographical heatmap also shows specific geographical areas that face buffering. Using this information, you can evaluate your portal’s connectivity on certain devices and in certain locations and optimize them accordingly. 

Error

Apart from buffering, a player may even stop playing the video altogether.  The QoE dashboard gives a count of how many times the player failed to play a video and. Just as with buffering, a graphical breakdown of player errors on devices – desktop, mobile or tablet – is given, as well as a geographical heatmap showing which areas experienced most errors. These errors could be for several reasons such as network disconnection from video source, video unavailability, player crashes, etc.

Video quality playing

For the entire playback duration of a video, you can see how much of it was viewed in which resolution – 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p or 1080p – in the online video analytics tool. This gives you a peek into the strength of your viewers’ internet connection and the bandwidth available to them. 

Additionally, you can view all this information consolidated for the entire portal as well, in the portal’s Reports Dashboard.

Interactivity reports

Another source of information on videos is reports of interactive elements embedded in the video, such as surveys, quizzes and handouts. Data like likes and favorites provides a certain insight into how well the content is received by the viewers when you compare it against the number of views on a certain media. But apart from those, by embedding surveys, quizzes or handouts (let’s call them the trinity henceforth, for brevity) at certain, possibly multiple timestamps on the video, you get a look into how many viewers made it to and through that timestamp by comparing the number of views on the video with the number of people who took the trinity. Interactivity reports even report the individual registered users that took the trinity.

Survey

Overall report

Question-based report

User-based report 

Quiz

Overall report

User-based report

Furthermore, surveys and quizzes can be used to take the viewers' feedback on their viewing experience and to gauge the understanding of the concepts delivered in the video. These reports provide a deeper insight through viewers' responses to individual questions.

Livestream analytics

A livestream can be controlled and monitored from the Live Control Room which also provides some insights that are unique to live streams. A graph represents a set of data updated in real time that includes:

• Current live views - viewers that are currently viewing the livestream, not necessarily unique 

• Total unique viewers – accumulated number of unique viewers that have engaged in the livestream so far, regardless of whether they are still tuned in 
• Total views – aggregated number of views the live session has received so far 

Just as with on-demand videos, the trinity can be added in the livestream at any time. The Reports tab in the Live Control View will show the number of attempts, passes and fails on a quiz, and the number of responses on a survey, as the responses are submitted by the user.

Federated analytics

For any integrated third-party business applications such as CRM, LMS or CMS, VIDIZMO offers federated analytics to provide media-related statistics of videos and other digital media embedded or shared to the integrated third-party platforms. As a result, VIDIZMO can track detailed media analytics regardless of which platform the media is embedded on. For instance, as part of an integration with a corporate CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce, VIDIZMO tracks and display analytics of video performance as part of the marketing or sales campaigns executed from the CRM.

Depending on the scope of a CRM integration, we can also provide holistic analytical data, let's say for a marketing campaign, gathered by the CRM alongside the media analytics data tracked and recorded by VIDIZMO's online video analytics tool. This would include rich media analytics of video used as part of the CRM for the marketing campaigns alongside broader marketing stats gathered by the CRM. In a federated analytics scenario, all such data would be accessible from a centralized VIDIZMO video analytics dashboard.

Conclusions

To increase adoption of video across the enterprise and optimize the viewing experience, you need to ensure content is being distributed seamlessly throughout your networks and data analyzed on a continuous basis to improve content and the user experience. A video content management system that is designed to let your business easily capture, store, distribute, and analyze videos with built-in online video analytics tools is your best bet.

Once content is uploaded using the simple built-in workflows, VIDIZMO automatically converts it into multiple formats for wider reach and encodes it into adaptive formats. The adaptive bitrate stream “adapts” to the speed of the viewer’s internet connection, switching to a smaller video file until more speed is available to deliver higher quality, both on desktops and mobile devices. The solution can be connected to a public or private Content Delivery Network (CDN) to facilitate global delivery, and the online video analytics tools – media analytics and quality of experience (QoE) – used to optimize live and on-demand streams across devices and operating systems.

Unlike other players in the Enterprise Video Content Management (EVCM) space, VIDIZMO offers all of this out-of-the-box, providing an end-to-end video solution for the forward-thinking enterprise, from an intuitive and highly configurable video portal with AI-enabled search to managing content delivery and video workflows to in-depth micro and macro analytics for continuous improvement.

The key to maximizing ROI from your enterprise video content strategy is to keep reviewing data constantly for knowledge on how you can increase video adoption and consumption, optimize the network, and embrace digital transformation completely. Try our solution today to experience these powerful analytics features!