Every year (since 2005), I edit a short “year in review” video for my wife Courtney for Christmas. Nothing special, just some quirky music with pictures and video clips from whatever we did that year. I consider it to be the most important project I work on all year. No matter how many other projects I find myself trying to wrap up by the year’s end, I always love finding time to do at least this one very important project.

I followed the same video sharing progression I use for CRLVIDEO after I completed (and gifted) this year’s 2011 Christmas video. I sent out a few emails, tweeted it, and posted it on my (and Courtney’s) Facebook walls. Like the analytics junkie that I am, I checked my Wistia stats on the video a few days after.

I was shocked by the numbers. An extremely personal video. Made up of personal memories. Featuring pictures and video of only my wife and me. Garnered a metric of 91% engagement across everyone who watched the video. Umm...what? We’re not talking about a 10 second video here. This was a 3 minute and 10 second video... one of the longest I’ve created in over 2 years. 67 people watched an average of 91% of the video. 91% of every vomit-inducing, sappy, love-drenched frame.

With this video, I reached a new milestone. The 2011 Christmas video became the most engaging video of all of the videos I host on Wistia. Why? I don’t think it’s because it’s my best video. I think it’s because the video offers a privileged look inside our lives. We’re not living any differently than a lot of other of our friends. It’s the sheer curiosity and downright creepiness of everyone in our Facebook network that led each person to click play and watch all the way through.

Not creepy enough for you yet? Check out the spike in the aggregate graph at around 2:15. People re-watching this section like woah. Why? Because it had a joke picture of a joke gift from two of our closest friends that fake alluded to Courtney being pregnant. Guess that explains the e-mails from people we haven’t talked to since high school asking when the baby is due and if we know what she’s having!

There are a few lessons I learned here:

• Facebook is a creepy yet intriguing means to share your work.
• Facebook can easily fake people out and make em’ think your wife has a bun in the oven! (p.s.: She doesn’t.)
• Analytics don’t lie (and can sometimes creep you out).
• It's okay to make video personal -- relatable techniques can keep viewers engaged!

Narrowing your marketing imagination to the idea of making a video that will go viral is very limiting; there are a lot of other ways to use think about using video to market your business, and most of these are much more accessible to the average company — and much more likely to succeed (it’s really, really rare for a video to go viral, and many of the most viral videos were never intended to explode to such a massive degree. Take both of those factors into account and it’s obvious why it’s hard to produce a viral video of your own).

Once you’ve put virality on the backburner, how can you think about video marketing? You can use video to scale the communications you already have. Optimize your videos for engagement and scale your story efficiently; if it takes several iterations to figure it out, that’s okay: video marketing should be an iterative process (and that’s where good analytics come in, hint, hint). Video is distinct from other ways of conveying information in a number of important ways: it’s a story told over time, in a logical order, in a way that can walk a viewer through something without overwhelming them.

Take this video of our office, for example. What purpose is this video serving? It’s somewhat akin to bringing someone into their office and walking around with them, showing them our space and our cast of characters. Because this sort of personal feeling is important to us, it’s not something that we want to lose, but we also don’t have time to do this for everyone for real as our company grows (and also, our customers are located all around the world).

In the last 9 months, this video, which is only available on our Company page, has been seen 3,000 times — the equivalent of that many office tours and that many hours of our time spent (especially since on average, these people watched 78% of the video). Using video also means that we can create tours of features that people might otherwise ask about instead of explaining them over and over again. This doesn’t just mean that we save time — it also means that this information is available to the customer whenever they want it, as many times as they need to hear it, and without having to feel guilty about asking a question. And then we can spend more time answering the more difficult questions that matter.

Using videos and tracking them closely means that you can get a good sense of what information people are likely to engage with on different parts of your website and will allow you to figure out what stage prospects are at as they view different pages. It will also help you to figure out what parts of your videos people are watching the most closely so you can hone these sections more precisely or highlight that content. Video is a unique, effective way to scale communication for your business, even if it doesn’t “go viral.” If you’re a huge company that can afford the risk of producing a high-budget video that may or may not see the success you initially hoped for, then it’s probably okay to put a lot of your eggs in that one basket. But if you’re a regular company that wants to use video effectively without so much risk, there are still a lot of ways that the medium can work to your advantage — without needing to get 6,000,000 hits.

This is the heartwarming tale (it warmed our hearts, at least) from the Blue Mango blog post:

Blue Mango was originally using a two minute long video introduction to ScreenSteps, their screenshot application. When they looked at the video’s analytics, they saw a problem. Only 25% of viewers were watching it all the way to the end. After reading our blog post, which showed that shorter videos have much higher audience engagement rates, Blue Mango decided that their video might be too long. They cut it down to a little over a minute and saw dramatic results. Once the video had been shortened, 75% of viewers were watched it all the way to the end.

It’s great for us to write about Blue Mango’s story, but it’s even better to hear it in their words. So don’t forget to check out their original post. They include their actual engagement graphs before and after re-editing their video. While you’re there, we recommend poking around their other posts; they have a lot of great stuff on there. Enjoy!

In September, we posted a blog on making video testimonials. In the blog, we embedded our first sample testimonial. After a few weeks, we embedded a shorter version of the same testimonial in the same spot. Here are the two videos, and what we learned from them:

1. Keep it short
Yes, the videos are very similar. But the average viewer watched 72% of the shorter video and only 50% of the longer video. The only difference: we left a 10 second clip out of the shorter video. Psychologists say that the average human sustained attention span is 20 minutes. But for online videos, it seems to be about 60 seconds.

Last year, we analyzed the viewing data from across our customer base and discovered that length really does matter for videos. The very fact that your video is three minutes long may explain your poor viewership.

2. Put the good stuff in the beginning
Most videos lose viewership overtime. Interest wanes as viewers get distracted, bored, or realize that the video is not for them. The moral here is: If there’s something that you really want people to see, it’s best to put it in the one of the first shots.

A fairly linear decrease in audience engagement is normal, but the longer version of our testimonial had an abnormally sharp decline in viewership within the first 20 seconds:

What is going on in the video during this decline? Let’s take a look:

When we didn’t include this clip in the shorter version of the video, our overall viewership statistics improved.

3. Be specific
Make sure every shot contains specific and new information. If you aren’t getting useful points across, people will stop listening. In the unsuccessful clip, Mike’s enthusiastic but vague endorsements of Wistia make the testimonial begin to sound like a bad advertisement – all raving and no substance. Later in the video, Mike talks more specifically about how and why he uses Wistia. More of the audience keeps watching because this information helps them understand the benefits they could glean from Wistia.

4. Keep it personal
In the shorter version of the testimonial, after he introduces himself Mike does not begin to talk about the product he is endorsing. Instead, he talks about his work environment and his personal experiences with Wistia. The audience can automatically relate to Mike, so they are more likely to stick around and hear what he has to say. People are naturally interested in other human beings. Use this to your advantage.

If you’re going to spend time and money making and posting a video, you don’t want a bored audience to ignore the fruits of your labor. If you follow simple guidelines to hold your audience’s attention, you’ll have a better chance to show them why your product is so great. Just by tweaking your video, you can significantly raise the percentage of people who take a second look at, and even sign up for, your product.

Did you improve your video to make it more successful? Are you interested in learning how you could? Let us know if you’d like us to analyze your video.

By default, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar use a proprietary and highly efficient video codec (called G2M3) to record your webinar. No video hosting provider up until now (not even YouTube) could convert these proprietary GoToMeeting video files. This meant that if you wanted make a recording of your webinar available after the event, people had to download the video file to their computer and hope that they had the GoToMeeting software installed to view it. Needless to say, this was a poor user experience.

Now, just upload your recorded meeting or webinar to Wistia, and they’ll be ready to be watched on every device.

Then you can:

• - Embed the webinar onto your website
• - Send out the webinar to people who couldn’t make it
• - Put the webinar behind a lead generation form to capture new prospects

And of course, you’ll get the same second-by-second video heatmaps and analytics that show you who is watching and what they are care about.

Play rate: The percentage of unique visitors that click play when presented with the video.

One of the most important (and overlooked) aspects of video analytics is the play rate. The play rate of a video is much like the open rate for an email. If you have a poor play rate, then nobody is going to receive your message.

The factors that effect play rate are the video’s thumbnail, the placement of the video on the page, the size of the video, and the video’s context.

There isn’t any published data about play rates available, so we’ve decided to remedy that. We pulled data from across our entire customer base; this includes every sort of video imaginable: front page videos, videos on blogs, videos on landing pages, and video sent out to huge mailing lists. These videos are used for marketing, sales, training, entertainment, and everything in between.

The average play rate across the entire sample set was 16.9%. This means that just about 1 out of every 6 people who loads a page with a video watches it.

Now let’s take a look at a specific example, the front page video on our website.

Our front page video is a honking 950 x 360 pixel headliner. It doesn’t get much bigger than this.

It’s the first thing people see when they arrive at wistia.com, and it’s an important part of the customer education process for us.

We get a 19% play rate our front page video, which is about 13% higher than the average play rate. This is interesting, but what really matters for us is what percentage of prospective customers are watching the video.

Around 30% of our visitors are customers logging in to their accounts, and the other 70% of visitors are prospective customers or folks just stopping by. We don’t expect existing customers to watch the front page video, so if we factor them out, we learn that about 30% of prospective customers watch the front page video.

The key to improving play rate is measuring it and then understanding your users. The better you understand their motivations, the easier it will become to make decisions that can improve play rate.

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We want to cover your video analytics in one of our future posts. Fill out this form if you’d like to be featured.

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About the Author: Chris Savage is the CEO and co-founder of Wistia. You can find him at @csavage and savagethoughts.com

As a result, we are starting a program that will allow us to share data and best known practices around video with the community.   We are doing this by offering free Wistia accounts (free for the period of the test) to a select group of companies that want to run interesting video experiments and allow the data and results to be shared with the community. What sort of video experiments do we think would be interesting?  Here are a few suggestions:

• How including a video in your email affects click through percentages
• The effect of different thumbnail images on how many people click play
• How length of video affects viewer engagement

While these are a few of our ideas, we are excited to hear about interesting experiments that you guys come up with as well.

If you are interested in participating and getting a free Wistia account (during the test), please fill out the form below and tell us what you would like to do!

Why are webinars valuable?

For the viewer, webinars provide a way to learn something new about a process, product, approach, or feature. In exchange the viewer is asked to give up their email and any other relevant contact information. For the host, webinars present a way to connect with a new audience. In return the host gets more leads, it’s a simple and overall valuable arrangement.

So why are webinars more valuable than previously thought?

They can be recorded. The first time the webinar is presented it creates value. But by simply recording your webinar it can continue to create value for months (and sometimes even years). Here are a couple of easy ways to get more from your recorded webinars.

• Feature it as a resource on your website
• Use it as the main event of an email campaign
• Have your sales team send it as follow up to prospects
• Provide access to those who couldn’t attend live

But how much value will my recorded webinar really add?

We’ll measure it. With webinars coming in at 30 and 90 minutes  in length, they are 15-50x longer than the average marketing video. NO ONE will watch 30 minutes (let alone 90) of something that isn’t interesting. This is a powerful point. By tracking those people that actually do watch your video you’ll learn which individuals are most interested in your topic (not a bad starting point for the sales team) and what interests people most in your webinar (so you can learn how to make your next webinar even better).

And here’s a teaser from a future post, a couple of the common ways we see people watching recorded webinars.

Just over two weeks ago we broke through the “Million Business Videos Served” mark. It took us about 4 months to hit that milestone.  Today we’re happy to announce that in the short span of two and a half weeks, we’ve flown right by 1.5 million embedded videos served. It is not only exciting to see such fast paced growth but to know that every one of those views can help inform and improve the videos and their messages.

Thank you to all of our fabulous customers for relying on us to deliver and track your business videos. It’s an honor to work with all of you. Thanks for driving us to be better.

Once upon a time there were two prospects, Jack and Jill. Every morning, Jack and Jill would run by Humpty Dumpty’s brick laying business. The duo would glance over during their runs but when Humpty would call out to them, they would point towards their destination, the top of a local hill. Even though they seemed interested in Humpty’s brick laying, Humpty could never get them to pay attention.

Then, Humpty remembered his video. Humpty sent emails inviting Jack and Jill to view a video in his Wistia account documenting his past successes and his impressive trowel work. Within a couple hours, email alerts from Wistia arrived telling him that both Jack and Jill had viewed the video.

By glancing at the statistics in his account, Humpty saw that Jack had watched only a small portion of the video, while Jill had watched the whole thing. In fact, Jill had watched several parts of the video more than once!



The next time Humpty saw Jill, he yelled out to her, this time offering to show her some of his recent masonry work in person. His persistence paid off. Jill was happy to divert her run once she knew what Humpty was yelling about.

Humpty found out which half of the duo he should be selling to and Jill signed a deal to lay the foundation of her new house with Humpty’s business. Everybody won.

To try the video heatmaps Humpty was looking at, click here.