A thorough and data-driven video strategy can enable digital publishers to get the full potential out of their video content.

Video is the best tool out there for increasing user engagement, but it needs to be used correctly.

Our online content consumption habits have increased dramatically over the past few years. Content has become much more accessible and we spend more time than ever on smartphones, tablets, laptops and watching connected TVs. The average person spends 6 hours and 43 minutes on the internet every single day. Anything and everything is possible and available online – education, entertainment, shopping, even exercise – to name a few. 

For online media, video has stood the test of time, being ever-present as a preferred content format. It is one of the best tools to engage users, especially today, when every brand is competing furiously for a tiny fraction of a customer’s time.

Despite video being such an effective tool to attract users, high quality video content is imperative. User engagement has been shown to decrease if a video is not high enough quality. But creating or acquiring good video content is expensive, and the heavy costs incurred often result in a sub-optimal ROI. 

Thorough video analysis results in a robust and data-driven content creation or acquisition strategy, enabling digital publishers to generate the best and most strategic return possible from their video content.

Video analysis helps you optimize your video content and its delivery.

Video analysis involves understanding the different elements that make up a video, and examining how each part performs. With this knowledge, it’s then possible to optimize your video in a data-driven way – increasing and expanding on the elements that are successful, and changing or removing the parts that are not.

The different components that make up a video can be split into two main categories: the content, and its delivery. The former is fairly self-explanatory: the actual content inside the video – a footballer scoring a goal, somebody laughing at a joke – and the related metadata and video tags. The delivery strategy looks at the user’s experience of the video and the effects of its placement. This includes where on a website a video should be placed, what content should be used for its thumbnail, which social media platforms the video should be shared to, etc. The title and description of the video also fall into this category.

Each small part of a video has numerous different metrics that can be optimized, depending on what the overarching end goal of the video is, and what KPIs have been defined for it. In some cases, it may be that the aim is to increase time on site in order to generate more advertising revenue. In others, a publisher may want to boost their social media presence, and want to optimize a video for shareability. The same video may not be effective for boosting time on site as well as social media shares. Analyzing each element step by step will indicate which metric permutations are most effective. 

Conclusion

For digital publishers, quality video content is vital in order to guarantee high user engagement. Detailed video analysis is an effective way to shape a strategy and ensure that both video content and delivery experience is the best it can be. Of course, the many different elements to compare and take into account mean that when done manually, video analysis becomes very time consuming very quickly. 

Did this pique your interest? This is just one piece of the video analytics puzzle. Watch out for our next post, about when the time is right to use intelligent, AI-driven video analysis. At Minute.ly, we use it to help you get the full potential out of your video content. Learn more about how we increase CTR, distribution and monetization opportunities.