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 to engagement graphs.

While heatmaps show how an individual played your media, the engagement graph allows you to see how your whole audience is playing your content. 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 the engagement of your audience, ie. who clicked play on the media. The orange section on top shows the number of 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 see specific data pertaining to the Actions.

All of this information can help you optimize your current medias, as well as guide you towards making even more engaging medias 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 see a deeper look into these numbers.

The summary stats contains useful metrics like the percentage of visitors that clicked play, and valuable statistics around audience actions (like how many people clicked on 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 that played your media divided by the unique visitors that came 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 things factor into whether visitors make the commitment to press play.

The Actions metric is pretty specific to videos (with the exception of Chapters). We get this number 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? Maybe it’s time to update the copy, or move it to a different section of the video.

The summary stats are also available in explanation form, which makes it easy to express those high-level stats to others, like a client or a boss.

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

Does your engagement graph look something like this?

That’s likely because you’re using Chapters! Chapters allow your users to quickly skim through the content and only play the sections of your media that are important to them. So you might see parts of your media that have a higher engagement rate 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 higher the number of clicks, the more popular the content. This might be a good indicator that you should create more content around this topic! 👀