As Joe wrote on Monday, publishers are doubling down on producing video content, but right now many people have little-to-no insight into how their video strategies are working – if they’re lucky enough to have a video strategy at all. We’re now giving you real-time data on how video is performing across your site and across the web, focusing especially on getting your most engaging videos in front of your visitors.

The Chartbeat Publishing Video Dashboard provides hugely important insights that are often missing from current video strategies, which is the context of your video content on your pages – as well as pages outside of your own site. Stand-alone video pages rarely prove successful for even the biggest publishers, while engaging articles can be bolstered by a quality video that supports the story in the text.

Now that we’ve armed you with some video strategy tips, so now let’s take a look at the new Chartbeat Publishing Video Dashboard.

Performance: Know what’s doing well

To understand how each video is performing, we’re focusing on five metrics – key measurements we see as the foundation for your coherent video content strategy. all of which are either new signature Chartbeat measurements or are select industry metrics that Chartbeat calculates differently through our real-time ping methodology:

A: Watching Now: The number of people watching your video right now

• What are most people watching? This metric helps you understand in real time which videos your audience is actively paying attention to. It’s not just the number of people who’ve loaded the page or even loaded the video – it’s the number who’ve actually started watching the video itself.

B: Play Rate: The percentage of visitors who actually played your video

• When your visitors see an embedded video, are they clicking play? This gives you insight into which videos people want to watch – which is influenced by the thumbnail image, the content of the video, and the context of the video embed on the page itself.

C: Average Engagement: The percent of each video that is actually watched

• How much of your video are your visitors actively watching? Just starting the video isn’t good enough. If you want them to come back tomorrow and the next day, you need to serve them video they want to sit through. The longer they’re watching, the better experience they’re having, and the more likely they are to come back to you for video.

D: Engagement Score: A single, consolidated score for evaluating your videos

• When the length of your videos varies, comparing video content can be inaccurate based purely on time or number of watches. Building off our Average Engagement metric, this score helps you easily compare video performance by grouping and contrasting videos with similar characteristics (notably length), so you’re comparing apples to apples.

Ad Drop-Off: The number of visitors leaving the video during ad pre-roll 

• Pre-roll ads are great for monetizing content, but are some ads and video content not playing well together? It is a great feeling when a piece of video content is getting a ton of page views. It is a terrible feeling when you realize later in the day that hardly anyone made it past the ad pre-roll. Avoid surprises.

• We let you know, in real-time, how many people aren’t getting past the ad, so you can be ready to switch in a different ad – or, in some cases, to lose the ad altogether to let your content shine.

Context: Know where your video is doing well

Unlike written content, which tends to be on a single page, a video can be embedded in a lot of different places – multiple articles pages, the homepage, video-specific pages, or even on other people’s sites.

When you click on a video in the Chartbeat Publishing Video Dashboard, you can see where that video is getting watched the most and compare performance metrics across all of those pages.

Opportunities: Find top pages that don’t have videos

Knowing where video is doing well is important, but what about where your video could be doing well? Because we look at your site holistically, rather than just your video content, we can highlight your best-performing articles that don’t have videos. Treat those as opportunities – places you might consider for video embeds.

Learn more about the Chartbeat Publishing Video Dashboard

You can learn more by visiting the Video Dashboard product page (link only works if you’re logged out of your Chartbeat account). I hope this introduction pumped you up for the Video Dashboard – feel free to share your questions or feedback in the Comments section, or get in touch with the Chartcorps to learn more.