Live streams are helpful for any business, irrespective of the domain. Even if you are a baker and want to present your recipes to the world or if you are an educator who wants to teach students in real-time, live streaming is feasible for all.
Preparing live streams takes a lot of effort, resources, and time, which is why you must do it right.
But how will you know that?
If this is the question hovering in your mind, then this might be the right place for you. With this article, we will learn about how you can measure the success of your live streams.
What are your live-streaming goals?
Before jumping into the parameters to measure the success of your live streams, you must define your goals for that.
- Drive engagement and create awareness.
- Want to grow your audience?
- Do you want to collect information for leads?
- Do you want to sell your products?
The point of the streaming metrics will be to help make better decisions in the future.
Parameters to measure the success of your live streams
You can gather live metrics during or recorded metrics after your live stream to determine if it performed well. Let us see in detail what streaming metrics you can consider measuring the success of your live streaming.
1. Social sharing
Social sharing is the metric that will help you determine how many people have shared your live stream. A share is counted when your stream is connected to any other website than the host website. The feature does not only tell you how many people are sharing it, but it also tells you the designated traffic. You can know from where you are getting your traffic and who plays your stream the most.
If you are holding a stream on social channels: you can compare where you are getting the most views and plan your next stream accordingly.
If you are holding a live stream in LMS, you can hold live streaming to determine `who joined your live stream within your academy users.
2. Current views and viewer retention
You can see how many unique users you have for your live stream. You can also check viewer retention, which is the number of users joining and leaving the live stream per second. High retention in live streaming means your videos are more engaging. Also, this is a fantastic way to know if your resources are engaging for your audience, irrespective of the platform you are choosing.
You can compare all of your live streams and check which one is working the best for you based on viewer retention. You can make content changes afterward to improve retention based on the statistics.
3. Viewer engagement
More engagement determines the quality of your content. More engagement means your audience is resonating with your content, which will help you generate more leads.
If the users find your content engaging, they will come back to see your other videos or streams as well.
When you are conducting life on social channels, you can instantly see who is commenting or chatting during your live streams.
When you are conducting life on LMS, you can see people commenting, chatting, and assigning break rooms to have personal discussions.
To improve engagement, you can also ask direct questions to the users, or you can ask them to share their views on any particular topic. The Q&A at the end will also help to engage the users, and they can also gain better knowledge about the topic you are covering in the webinar.
The faster the audience responds, the better the engagement is. You must create an environment for all your employees to interact with each other and respond to the speaker as well.
4. Device viewership
People nowadays watch live streams on their phones, laptops, or even smart TVs. Device viewership means where people are viewing your live stream.
But how does it even help me?
Are you also thinking about it? Well, you can see from where most of your traffic is coming, and then you can plan your live streaming accordingly for the best experience.
If you find most of your audience is streaming through mobile, you can add elements that will help improve the user experience. For instance, you can use more line spacing to make the text look much clearer in the mobile view.
Or if you find most of your users stream through laptops or desktops, you can add colors to your texts to differentiate and improve the user’s experience.
5. Track time
Software like affiliate tracking can help you determine how long a user has viewed your live stream. This will also help you determine whether your users liked your video or not. If someone watches your whole stream, it means they liked it. But if someone is watching for some seconds, it tells they do not find it interesting.
It will not help you if you see the statistics for a single person, but it works when you collect data for hundreds of people. You can calculate a definite percentage of the watch time.
If you’re expecting 100% watch time, you may be living in an illusion because that might not be possible. The attention span of people has dropped drastically, and this is why no one watches or reads the entire video or blog.
Try to determine the engagement based on these statistics. If you find low engagement based on the numbers, you can ask yourself why the engagement is low.
This will need you to contemplate your entire content and see what is going wrong.
6. Geographic location
If you want to know where your video is mostly streamed, you can ask your analysts to track down the IP address. This will help you determine where the highest demand area is. Moreover, you can get help in the following:
- You can monetize your pricing ranges according to audience engagement.
- You can use this data to target your audience and generate quality leads.
- You can also develop your advertising based on the statistics you gathered.
- This will also help you to understand what language you should be using for your live streams.
- You can make translations of your previous streams as well to help the majority of your audience.
- It also tells you if you want to put any geographical restrictions.
When you are streaming to put forward your ideas to the world, the power of streaming metrics will help you harness the success of your live streaming.
The metrics will help you understand your audience’s choices and will help you make better decisions.
