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Heatmaps

The Wistia heatmap shows a second-by-second view of how your audience engaged with your medias.

Caroline F avatar
Written by Caroline F
Updated over a week ago

A media heatmap is a graphical representation of a single viewing or listening session of your media. Each public viewer of a Wistia-hosted media is assigned a heatmap, which shows the specific interaction they had with the media.

Heatmaps are a powerful tool for understanding how your audiences engages with your content. Is there a specific topic that is interesting to your audience from your email campaign? Do international fans tune out quicker than local ones? When are the most engaged audience members viewing your media? This information and more can be derived from heatmaps.

Note

A heads up to our friends with podcasts! Heatmaps will only generate for plays on Wistia or from a Wistia embedded episode.

Heatmaps

heatmap

Heatmaps contain audience information, contextual information (when the media was played and where) and a color-coded timeline which represents how an audience member interacted with the media.

At the end of each heatmap is the total percentage of the media that the your audience member played (parts played multiple times are only counted once).

single-video-heatmap

The time (and potentially date) to the left of the heatmap displays when the media was played.

Next to the time you’ll see a number in a blue or grey box — this number indicates the total number of your Wistia medias this person has watched. If the box is blue, this means you’re looking at an identified audience member, either gathered from an email blast or entered manually through a Turnstile.

Tip

Want to only see identified leads account-wide? Head to your Audience page.

The small caret next to the name and location of the audience member opens the heatmaps to share even more data. Here you’ll find stuff like device (browser and environment), IP address, and page where they played the media. Woo!

Tip

See a little phone icon next to a viewer’s name or network? That means someone played your media on a mobile device. You can also export this data.

video heatmap meta data

Clicking on the name (or network) on the heatmap will take you to the viewer page for that viewer. The viewer page is part of the View Stream.

Heatmap Colors

Heatmaps are color-coded to show you which sections of your media a particular audience member found interesting.

  • White means that portion of the media was not played at all (it was skipped).

  • Green tells you that the audience member played that part exactly once.

  • Yellow means the audience member watched or listened to that part twice.

  • Orange, light red, and dark red show that that part of the video was watched or listened to three, four, or five times respectively.

The “hotter” the color, the more times your fan engaged with your content.

Waypoints on Heatmaps

Do you see a grey dot with a white circle in the middle of your heatmap?

heatmap-waypoints

That’s a waypoint! That indicates that your audience member took a certain action on your media (like clicked on a CTA or annotation link). Hover over the waypoint to see exactly what that action was.

heatmap-waypoint-context

Check out the Video Stats page for more information on Action stats.

Heatmaps Troubleshooting

Can’t see your heatmaps? Head over to the Troubleshooting page for more help.

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