Thousands of similarly mission-driven organizations are broadcasting their messages using live streams to try to amplify their voices and reach their audiences. How can you discover which areas of your live stream setup need improvement?
In this resource, we’ll go over live stream analytics. We’ll highlight some of the most important statistics to track so you can make sure your live online events are having the impact you intended.
1. Look at Total and Concurrent Views
View count is often the easiest metric to identify. Everyone is aware of it, but what does a “view” even mean? Technically, this can vary from one platform to the next. For instance, on YouTube, a “view” for a live stream is the number of times it was viewed while live. Facebook has its own criteria, as does TikTok, X, and so on.
When considering the number of views, two things that stand out are total unique viewers and total concurrent viewers. The former gives you an idea of the total number of people you reached with your event. It is the same as counting every person who sets foot in the door of a conference center or church, regardless of what happens after they’re in the building. The latter tells you how many members of your audience were tuned in at the same time — i.e., the maximum crowd watching your event concurrently.
The number of viewers can help you understand the general success of your event. Concurrent viewership shows you portions of the event that were particularly interesting to your audience.
2. Review Retention Rate
Retention rate gives you another key viewership insight: how long people actually watched your event. Often, something is counted as a “view” simply by playing a video for a few seconds. While the audience members were technically engaged, though, that doesn’t mean they stuck around.
You wouldn’t consider it successful if you had an in-person conference and half of your audience stepped in the door, looked around for three seconds, and left, right? Tracking your retention rate through stats like playtime and average playtime can give you an idea of how well your audience enjoyed the content itself.
3. Consider Engagement Rate
Like views, your engagement rate can vary based on your event. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s important to identify what an engaged viewer is in your live stream context and then track how engaged they are during the actual event.
For instance, engagement rate on a Facebook video could be a view, a like, or a comment. If you’re running a livestream event with a chat section or breakout sessions, these could also be an engagement factor. The same goes for if you have links on the screen, make a promotional offer, or ask people to sign up for a newsletter.
Tracking these kinds of engagements gives you critical insights that go beyond attendance. They show you whether you’re generating the results you’re hoping to see, as well.
Using Sardius Media Analytics to Maximize Live Stream Impact
Most tools have these stats in some form or another. While you can pull data manually from Facebook, YouTube, and similar sites, that is a time-intensive activity that many mission-driven broadcasters can’t invest in.
Fortunately, you can streamline the process by using the Analytics portion of the Sardius Platform. Our comprehensive analytics section uses data from three main areas of analytics:
- Quality of Service (QoS): This helps you understand the user experience while viewing, including length of engagement (time spent watching), buffer ratio, and number of plays.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): This expands on QoS (which doesn’t work for those who have turned off JavaScript) and enriches the data based on CDN metrics of delivery.
- Platform Usage: This adds nuanced elements, such as storage and transcoding usage, into data banks that are used to generate analytics presentations and takeaways.
This gives you a vast collection of detailed information, such as playback timing, device specifics, location data, and much more. Many of our analytics go behind the scenes, as well, such as tracking playback errors, billable minutes, and codec.
Our analytics features go beyond telling you how your event performed. Sardius’ live stream analytics empower you with actionable insights to help you decide if your event was a success and take steps to improve it in the future.
As the Sardius team puts it, success should always be measurable. If you find your live streams are delivering vague or subpar results, we’d love to work with you to identify the areas where you can make adjustments to maximize impact and ensure your mission-driven message reaches the right people.