Ever wonder how to interpret the graphs Wistia provides? Want to know how your audience is engaging with your media? Here’s your one-stop shop for engagement graphs.

While heatmaps depict individual viewing sessions, the engagement graph provides an aggregate view of audience interactions with your media.

You can see which sections of your media your audience rewound and played multiple times, and which sections they stopped playing. Drop-offs show where your audience stopped paying attention, and big spikes indicate a section of the media that people found compelling enough to replay.

The blue section of the engagement graph shows your audience's engagement (i.e., who clicked play on the media). The orange section at the top shows how many times that section of the media was replayed.

Move your cursor over the graph (from left to right) to see the specific engagement at that point in the media, and click the graph to play the media from that point. Click any of the waypoints below the graph to view specific data for the Actions.

All of this information can help you optimize your current media and guide you towards creating even more engaging media in the future. 🚀

Next to the engagement graph are summary stats to give you a high-level view of how that media has performed to date. Click "Show Details" to get a deeper look into these numbers.

The summary stats include useful metrics like the percentage of visitors who clicked play and valuable statistics on audience actions (like how many people clicked your spiffy Call to Action). Within the Show Details section, we show you how we get these numbers.

For example, the Play Rate metric is the number of people who played your media, divided by the unique visitors to the page containing the media (expressed as a percentage). This metric helps you understand a lot of things ,  like the positioning of your video on the page or the image used for the podcast cover art. All of these factors influence whether visitors make the commitment to press play.

The Actions metric is pretty specific to videos (with the exception of Chapters). We get the conversion rate by dividing how many people interacted with your actions (clicked on them, or entered their email with Turnstile) by how many people viewed them in total. Got some low numbers on an Annotation Link? Maybe it’s time to update the copy or move it to a different section of the video.

Need more information on each of these metrics? Check out our Media Analytics Overview page for a full breakdown of average engagement, total plays, play rate, and action stats!

Does your engagement graph look something like this?

That may be because you’re using Chapters. Chapters let your viewers quickly skim the content and play only the sections of your media that are important to them. So you might see parts of your media with higher engagement rates than others.

Chapters will be indicated by the gray dots below the engagement graph. Hovering over them will reveal the total number of clicks.

The more clicks, the more popular the content. This might be a good indicator that you should create more content around this topic! 👀