How to measure your YouTube video length performance

Quick post today about YouTube video analytics and in particular how to measure your Youtube video length’s performance with scatter plot chart .

This information will help you make decisions around your video content length creation as well as help you decide at which point you should position your call to actions.

Note that the analysis below makes more sense to long length videos rather small 30 seconds advertorials. The samples below were taken from 30+ minute webinars that were promoted via YouTube advertising.

Is Video Length Important?

Well I suppose no one wants to make videos content that gets abandoned quickly for two main reasons. Firstly you do not want to spend hours of content creation and production if most of your users abandon the video quickly and secondly if your video generate results within a short amount of view % then you might want to consider optimising you call to actions and at which point they should appear in your video.

In order to create the relevant graph you will need two metrics. Average video length and View %. Average video length with the latter converted to decimal minutes compared to the original YouTube format.

There is a cool online calculator that you can use but if you want to do it directly to excel then type =(A1-INT(A1))*24*60 where A1 is the field you have entered the avg. video length in the following format: 0:25:30, where 0 are the hours, 25 are the minutes and 30 are the seconds.

If you want to convert video length into seconds then replace 60 with 3600 in the formula: =(A1-INT(A1))*24*3660

Once you do that in excel select your metrics and use Scatter chart in excel then Exponential Line.

Your graph should look like the one below.

With a glance we notice that videos up to 30 seconds have 97% of average view duration (first blue dot on the bottom, close to value-100). The higher the duration goes the lower the % of Avg.View.Duration which is normal and expected.

However the most interesting observation is that between 5 and 25 minutes length (red circle) the % Avg.View Duration remains the same (green line within red circle). In the example below this is roughly 51%.

Observing the graph a bit further we notice that we lose 20% of the viewership when a video moves from 30second to 60 second (see table below)

Then another 20% when a video moves from 1 minute to 6 minutes.

In total 45-50% of traffic loss between 1 to 6:45 – almost 7 minutes.

The remaining audience that will not drop out will watch between 40-50% of the video regardless its length.  Only 15% traffic loss from 5mins length to 25minutes.