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.
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 above it shows how many times that section of the media was replayed.
The point where the blue line falls is where attention dropped. For second-by-second detail on an individual session, check out heatmaps.
Understanding engagement graphs
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 (such as Calls to action and Annotation links).
All of this information can help you optimize your current media and guide you towards creating even more engaging media in the future.
Tip
Want to know more about understanding engagement graphs? Check out our Understanding Audience Retention guide on the Wistia blog.
Engagement graph details
Next to the engagement graph are summary analytics 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 analytics include useful metrics like the percentage of visitors who clicked play and valuable analytics on audience actions (like how many people clicked your Call to action). Within the Show Details section, we show you how we calculate these numbers as well.
For example, the Play Rate metric is the number of people who played your media, divided by the unique page loads (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 thumbnail. All of these factors influence whether visitors make the commitment to press play.
Note
If your media is set to autoplay, Play Rate can appear well below (or above) 100% and won't match your page visits. Wistia only counts a "play" when there's real interaction with the player (i.e. clicking play, unmuting, scrubbing the timeline)—an autoplay load on its own isn't a play. This means that if a video is set to autoplay and doesn't receive any player interactions, the play rate can be significantly lower because the video loading and autoplaying isn't technically counted as play event.
A single viewer replaying a section can push the play rate above 100%, because each interaction with the player in this instance counts as a "play." This is expected, not a tracking issue.
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 a Wistia Form) 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.
Tip
Views from anyone logged into your Wistia account—owners, managers, and invited collaborators—are excluded from your public analytics and logged separately in your Account settings, on your Private User Sessions page. If you're testing and see no engagement, watch the video in an incognito window so you're counted as an anonymous viewer.
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 analytics!
Chapters in engagement graphs
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!