Understand Audience Engagement
Understanding audience engagement is the first step towards achieving your goal for online business. Increasing participation, improving learning, and enhancing satisfaction are the benefits of effective audience engagement. It’s pretty easy to convince professionals in the e-learning industry that learners who are more engaged and involved have a higher likelihood of achieving their goals.
In order to create engaging content, the Learning & Development process needs to include some form of measurement and tracking of how engaging past content was. All this can be done through data analysis.
A highly engaged audience shares their experience with your content on social media. They will do marketing and serve as brand ambassadors: spreading the word, building referrals, and generating interest in future events.
This article focuses on what audience engagement is and how you can keep them engaged. For more information, read our article on 11 Tips for Making Engaging E-learning Videos.
What is Audience Engagement?
In the publishing industry, there has been a lot of discussions about audience engagement recently. But what exactly does that mean? There isn't a clear definition of the word "audience engagement," therefore I decided to divide it into two. The Cambridge dictionary describes engagement as: In addition to agreeing to marry someone, engagement is:
- Becoming involved in something;
- Motivating people to take an interest in an organization's work, etc.
Regardless of its somewhat vague definition, the term still implies a happy feeling, someone who likes what you do. Therefore, I think that the following definition is appropriate when it comes to audience engagement for web publishers:
“The level of involvement or interest your website visitors show in your content.”
Data Analysis Helps You Determine Audience Engagement
In an analytics platform like Cinema8, advanced reports are provided on metrics that indicate learner engagement, like the number of hours spent learning, the progress made, comments from learners, and breakdowns of assessments, enabling course and content comparisons. Using data analysis, you can get the full picture of your program's engagement, which can help you plan the next step.
We can refer to audience engagement as either one of two things:
1. How we keep our audience engaged
2. How audience engages with the content we produce
How we keep our audience engaged
In the first point, we need to examine how people arrive at our site, be it through social media, email, or other means. For this, we should examine our analytics to see how efficiently our content is being marketed to various audiences and how their interaction with it differs based on their referring sources.
For example, if most of our Facebook traffic spends less than a minute on our site and doesn't explore other sections, it means that we are marketing our content in such a way that attracts Facebook users, but when they arrive at our site, they don’t get what they were looking for.
Read our article on Tips to Hook Your Audience in the First 5 seconds to produce enticing video content.
How audience engages with the content we produce
As to the second point, we should first consider the type of people who visit our website, in particular, do they arrive as new visitors or returning visitors? Visitors need to return to your website unless your mission statement is entirely different from all others. Visitors who return are the ones who interact most with your content, not those who are new. However, the importance of new visitors can't be overstated.
A new visitor browses your site, whereas a returning visitor will engage with the content you publish - be it an interactive video or article. It is only valuable to learn how to attract new visitors to your website if you know how to keep them engaged as returning visitors.
Our site's ability to convert new visitors into engaged, returning users depends on our understanding of how readers are engaging with the site and what challenges they are encountering. To achieve this, we should also take steps to make our content easily digestible and meaningful for them.
6 Simple Steps to Analyze Video Content Engagement
A video's success depends on its watch time and the number of views, which in turn depends on how engaging your video content is. No marketing campaigns work if your content is dull or boring. In order to come up with interactive videos, you need to focus on video analytics by considering the following metrics:
1. Number of Views
Whether we are talking about written content or video content, the number of views and watch time shows how engaging our video is. With Cinema8, you can easily keep track of how many people watch your videos and for how long, what part they enjoy the most, and where they leave your video. With all this information, you can overcome your lackings and improve your content for better audience engagement and marketing campaigns.
2. Social Sharing
People only share a video when they genuinely like it or have understood all parts of that post. You’re doing great if you have a high number of shares on your videos. It also increases the chances of reaching a great target audience.
Social sharing makes a significant impact. The more people who watch your video, the more powerful it is. Therefore, get your video shared as it will reach as many people as your goal.
3. Check Click-Through Rate
Click-through Rate (CTR) tells you how many people clicked on the call to action on your video. Consider this metric carefully if your video seems to be engaging your viewers effectively.
What is your click-through rate? If it’s high, it seems that your target audience is really interested in your video and is compelled to take the action you want them to. Therefore, a careful analysis of this metric really increases your sales and conversions.
4. Analyze Play Rate
Play count and pageviews matter a lot when we talk about data analysis. When combined, they refer to the play rate, indicating what percent of people visited your website and who opted to watch your video by hitting the play button. In terms of conversions, your play rate represents a lot about the performance of your website.
5. Check Audience Engagement
A person's engagement is determined by how often they view content or how many times they view it. Metrics like these help measure the view, which grounds the quality of the view. You are likely to see increased engagement when your message is well received.
6. Conversion Rate
Conversion rates are among the most important metrics when talking about audience engagement. In other words, it's a measure of how many clients or leads you've acquired by using your videos. It is the ultimate measure of the number of viewers who converted to leads.
Read our article on https://cinema8.com/blog/do-these-to-get-people-to-watch-your-videos-till-the-end to come up with videos that never fail!
9 Simple Steps to Analyze Written Content Engagement
In order to gauge the performance of your website, you can track various user engagement metrics. Despite this, it's crucial to determine which metrics are of most value to your business. We have compiled nine key metrics for you to evaluate.
1. Views on Your Page
Your site's page views determine how frequently people visit your website, in other words, how often specific pages on your site are visited. Strong search engine optimization and/or viewer interest can lead to a high number of pageviews or video watch time. On the other hand, viewers may be clicking around your site because they cannot locate what they want. It can be hard to understand your page views without considering additional metrics (continue reading below).
2. Video Watch Time or Time Spent Reading the Content
You can tell a lot about the interest of your site visitors by the time they spend looking at your content or watching videos. We can measure time spent in two different ways:
- Micro View: How much time do users spend on one specific page of your website.
- Macro View: The entire time users spend on your entire website.
3. Bounce Rate, Exit Rates, and Exit Pages
The bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors leave your site after viewing only one page. The effectiveness of a call-to-action is highly dependent on this metric. If visitors leave your site without taking action, your content is not successful.
The exit page is the last page viewers see before they leave your website. Your exit rate measures how many website viewers leave after viewing your exit page. The reason for high exit rates on non-exit pages may be a lack of clarity, too much information, disorganization, or a lack of information. By measuring your exit rates on these pages, you can understand how you can improve.
The bounce rate and exit rate both measure the last pages visitors view on your site before leaving.
4. Unique Page Views Per Session
Another method of measuring the interest of your target audience is to look at the number of unique pages visited per session. The number of unique pages shows the complete path that the website visitor follows. During a browsing session, if viewers visit a large number of pages, it indicates that the information on your website is useful to them and they are interested.
5. New and Returning Visitors
It compares the number of new website visitors with the number of previously visited ones. In Google's opinion, returning visitors who return to your site after more than two years are considered new visitors again. This metric is commonly presented as a graph of two measurements compared with each other.
6. Conversion Rate
Generally, conversion rates refer to the percentage of visitors who engage in the mentioned call-to-action, whether it's buying your product, downloading useful information, contacting a customer service representative, etc. The content on your website is successful if your visitors take action after going through it.
7. Email Sign-ups
Signing up for email is an important part of your lead conversion strategy. Keeping in touch with an interested audience via an email list is an excellent method of engagement. If you publish new content that is appealing, your audience will be interested in knowing when it will be published.
8. Shares on Social Media (Social Shares)
Sharing on social media refers to any time a user shares your content and videos with their followers. The fact that a user shares your content shows how interesting and engaging your content is. The act of sharing is more important than liking or commenting. The number of likes and comments does not necessarily reflect the consumption of the content. Shares, however, are indicative of genuine interest.
9. Traffic from Organic Search
Ranks in search results determined by organic search traffic indicate whether or not your website appears in more searches. It is likely that you will see a rise in organic search traffic if you appear in more rankings. You should keep track of how many visitors come to your website from search engines month after month.
How to Increase Audience Engagement?
You might wonder how you can solve this problem if you run a smaller media organization. Here are a few tips that can help you increase audience engagement and run successful marketing campaigns for sales growth.
Summary or Table of Content
Often people are not willing to invest their time in reading or watching the entire content. They look for the summary or table of content to get a general idea of what the content has for them. Providing them with the table of content at the top of the article or a summary in the description box of your video will help them understand what to expect and make them more inclined to read or watch it.
Read Time for Written Content
There are a lot of sites that use Estimated Reading Time. It's important to let readers know what to expect ahead of time so they can prepare themselves and go on to read an interesting article.
An Overview of the Article
It is all too common for headlines to convey the entire message of an article. No headline can do the job, no matter how cleverly crafted, with a longer story. If writing a longer article, consider including a summary at the top of it. The main point of the story can be summed up in summary, and the main takeaways can be emphasized.
Relevant Thumbnails
The thumbnails of a video should provide some insight into what the video will be like. However, it is important to make sure you don’t add irrelevant content or something that’s not included in the video, as doing so will damage your audience's trust. Add relevant and eye-catching thumbnails.
Ask Questions
Asking questions keeps the reader or viewer engaged. Your questions must also be relevant to the content. In fact, if the viewer is losing interest or getting distracted, questions help you regain their attention.
Use Forms and Multiple Choice Questions
Survey forms and Multiple Choice questions work best when you need to know more about your target audience. Including different activities is a highly effective method of keeping visitors engaged.
Read our article on How to Design Better Multiple Choice Questions for more information.
Bottomline
Your content is of no use if it’s not converting viewers into buyers. Understanding audience engagement should be your first priority, as your marketing campaigns and content will depend upon your audience’s interests and needs.
In order to run a successful video marketing campaign, video analytics are indispensable, so make sure you have all of the tools and knowledge you need. If you wish to create interactive video experiences for your videos, you can use platforms such as 'Cinema 8'. The platform enables video enthusiasts to create engaging, gamified, and interactive videos.