Welcome to Part 2 of our Zype Analytics Series! You can find Part 1 right here. In this post we will quickly give a rundown on how data is a valuable tool that can be used to help build and retain audiences. It’s pretty straightforward, but important all the same.
What You Should Be Getting
Using analytics, be it from Google, YouTube, or Zype’s impressive offering of simple and easy-to-read analytics, content owners should have access to all their video business’s data. If they don’t, they will need to drop whatever system they’re using and run to somewhere that’s comprehensive (without being overwhelmingly hard to decipher). You’ll want to see which videos are popular, which groups they’re popular with, and to be able to adjust your marketing and content creation or acquisition efforts to match needs accordingly.
The necessary KPIs (or Key Performance Indicators) to collect are content performance, viewer trends, audience segmentation, revenue metrics, and the overall health of your OTT service.
Going Further
To take all this one step further, it is important to determine a baseline performance level over a reasonable period of time so that you can correctly identify any changes or anomalies and react accordingly.
For instance, launching a new service might excite the marketplace for a couple of weeks, but then level off and look entirely different after 3 months. Being able to accurately monitor these data points will allow for proper forecasting and stabilize your growth.
Be sure to check out Pt. 1 of the Analytics Series, Finding the Right Solution, here!
It’s important to monitor the performance of your overall library, aggregated playlists and individual titles, too. What you’re looking to track here is total number of views, search term (metadata/tag) relevance, and marketing efforts to determine conversion rates. As your OTT service ages, it’ll be advantageous to know if content performs better during certain times of year so that you can plan out a content schedule and focus your marketing efforts accordingly.
Retain, Retain, Retain
Grouping content into playlists makes it easier for viewers to say subscribed to your service. If your viewer is watching Season 1 Episode 1 of a specific series and they watch the full episode from beginning to end, it is likely that they will be interested in Episode 2. Having that pre-loaded into a playlist encourages your viewer to keep watching. For example, if your content is a cooking series, then dropping in similar episodes of another cooking show might entice your use to watch that particular show. Knowing that similar content is available improves the viewer experience and allows you to track how content performs.
Find out how to monetize playlists with Zype
To stay with this example, if your viewers are watching similar content in two cooking shows but consistently dropping off on a similar third series, then you will know that there is something occurring that requires further analysis. You can troubleshoot search terms and categorization data to ensure that the metadata is accurate and properly tagged — and if it is, perhaps the viewers do not enjoy that specific show and you can start to figure out why.
But Beware
Don’t drown in numbers. There’s an x-factor in going beyond looking at the numbers, and using them to reinforce your gut to make the right decisions. To effectively do that, we feel like there has to be a simplicity in your analytics. That right decision can then come easily when you aren’t distracted by trying to decipher your data, or if there’s less pointless data trying to take your attention.
Not all analytics are created equal. A deluge of hard-to-read numbers can work against you, even if it's comprehensive. On the flip side, you do not want to mistake "minimal" for "ease."
Be Unstoppable
With the right tools, data can be used to retain and grow an existing audience by suggesting and recommending content they may like for curation into the service. The more granular the data, the more valuable it will be for acquisition, growth, and retention.
There’s no excuse in today’s world to not have access to helpful data. Everything can be tracked and quantified and available at a moment’s notice when you need to make big decisions. At Zype, our analytics are robust and easy to interpret. Click here to request a Zype demo, and make sure you stay tuned for Part Three of our Analytics Series, coming soon.
If you liked this post and want more insight into the world of OTT, download Zype's latest white paper and ultimate guide: OTT and Beyond!