So you went live on Facebook, congrats! But now, you have to figure out was it even worth it? How do you measure the performance of your livestream? Well don’t worry, beause today we’re moving beyond the surface level, vanity metrics and taking a deep dive into how to look at Facebook Live Video analytics and what really matters.
Live video is awesome and super effective at growing your audience and creating a loyal following but you have to understand if it’s working for your goals specifically. So let’s dig into making data driven decisions to optimise your Facebook Live videos so that they can actually grow your business. After we look at the data part, we’re actually gonna tell you which metrics actually matter and why most marketers are getting their data and measuring wrong!
Where to Find Facebook Analytics
First, you need to be super clear on where you can get analytics inside the Facebook ecosystem. You’re not gonna find it on your personal profile. You don’t get any analytics there. In groups, you get group specific analytics. Like how many members you have, whether engagement is going up or down, popular days and times for activity in your group and who your most active members are. This can be useful in its own right but you won’t get much data around retention or live video views or engagement. But on your business page, you’re gonna get all the analytics you want and probably more than you want. So let’s take a look.
Once you’re on your Facebook page, what you’re going to do is go into the creator studio. What we’ve got here is the dashboard and you can definitely look at the dashboard for some general insights.
So if you click insights on the left hand side, you’re really going to start to dig in to some more analytics and information. So the thing is, you’ve got general insights and if you want specific insights about any particular video, you will be able to do that by going individually into each video by clicking through but really what you’re looking at right up front is the performance of your videos in general, of your whole page.
Video Performance
So in the performance section you have your minutes viewed and then you can click through to see one minute video views and if it’s up or down from a previous set timeline.
You can go yesterday, last 28 days, this month, this quarter.
You then are looking at three-second video views. Stay tuned until the end because there’s something we need to talk about when it comes to the three-second video views.
Or you can look at engagement, this is a super helpful one because you’re actually seeing higher engagement or lower engagement. Are people showing up? Are they not?
And then of course you can see your net followers as well, whether that’s going up or down.
You have the ability to look at how things were sorted, so let’s go to minutes viewed.
You can look at organic versus posted or cross posted or shared, the followers as well as live or video.
Loyalty
Next let’s click on over to loyalty. Of course, loyalty is one of the most important things in terms of your audience engagement because that means that people are coming back over and over and over, they like your content.
If you scroll down, you can actually see how many returning viewers you had and which videos they returned to. That will give you an idea of what kind of content you should actually keep creating. If they’re not returning to a piece of content you thought they would, then it’s a sign that you need to make some adjustments.
Audience
The audience tab will give you a lot of information around your audience. Who are they? Where are they watching from? So while this isn’t going to give you much information in terms of engagement, you can use this to determine who your audience are and start targeting content to the types of people who are watching you.
Retention
Retention will give you a better understanding where your viewers are coming from. Take a look at Recommendations – is Facebook recommending your video after another video? Followers is a great one to look at to tell if your followers are still interested in your content? You can look at if views are coming from your shares as well.
Average Time People Spent Watching is a tricky one to actually garner some information from. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. You can use this as an overview but do not put too much pressure on yourself when it comes to this particular insights.
Facebook Live Video Analytics: Views & Viewers
So while your general insights are gonna give you a great look at how your page is doing with all content, we really wanna look at individual live videos to understand how your live videos are performing.
So we’re gonna click on the most recent live video and the peak live viewers. This is one of the most important pieces of analytics to be pay attention to and whether that’s increasing over time.
Also where is your peak happening? If your peak is happening right towards the top of the stream, like this one is, that’s actually unusual. Most people’s peaks happen 18 to 20 minutes in your live video, so you should adjust your content based on that information if that’s happening consistently.
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Next we go into minutes viewed. This is a stat that you can look at over time. Because of the way Facebook tracks analytics, views and the way the nature of Facebook is being a feed, a lot of the analytics that you’re gonna see is actually pretty misleading. You can’t look at any of them in isolation. Here’s an example. There are one-minute video views, 10 seconds, three seconds. A lot of that is coming because the feed is scrolling by and that’s not going to give you an accurate description of what is actually happening.
Especially if we click into average video watch time, you can see that people are actually watching. However ,the video average percent watched is citing zero percent, which can’t be the case. So again, look at everything together and you’ll get a more accurate description of what’s actually happening on your channel.
Now audience retention. This graph will give you an indication of how long you’re keeping people there in general. And the longer you keep them there, the better off you are. So in this graph, people are dropping off dramatically right at the beginning of the stream. Now is the perfect chance to ask yourself why? Are you not holding their attention? Are you not engaging them right up front? What’s happening in your content that you can make adjustments to, to make that graph more stable?
But do keep in mind, the audience retention graphs are going to see some drop offs. Every retention graph we’ve ever seen on Facebook has a big drop off right in the beginning, so don’t let that discourage you.
Live Video Analytics: Engagement
It’s more important that you focus more on the engagement factors, the comments, the reactions, the things that actually are done by people. Instead of using these confusing graphs to confuse you and your data driven decisions even more. So let’s look at those engagements because Facebook will actually show you what these engagements are.
So if you go into post engagements, you’ll see that 62 people liked this, 13 people loved it, one person gave a sad face, probably because of something that was said or they accidentally hit the sad face. Sometimes you do get angry faces, sad faces and it’s actually not intentional, so don’t go crying. You can also see the total number of comments, the total shares, so if shares is something that’s really important to you to get more organic traffic, then ask for that in your streams and track how many shares you’re getting.
Facebook Live Video Analytics: Funnel Insights
So when we look at funnel insights, this is actually Facebook attempting to be helpful with these three-second and 10-second views. It’s trying to give you a bit more of an understanding of how engaged your audience is. Basically it’s taking the three-second views, trimming that down to the one minute video views and then looking at the engaged people. This is the number of people who commented, shared or reacted to your video. So if you’re looking for percentages, that’s where you would find this.
While all of these insights are fantastic and you’ll be able to understand more about how your live stream is performing, let’s talk about the biggest mistake that other marketers make.
The Biggest Mistake Marketers Make with Analytics
That mistake is making all of your decisions based on those insights alone. Facebook live video analytics can be really powerful if interpreted correctly and they can be equally as dangerous if you aren’t looking at the right metrics. So avoid making super isolated decisions based on this information because the truth is, Facebook Insights can be pretty misleading.
So look at your data points as they relate to each other, not just alone. Do not pay attention to the three-second or 10 second views, first of all, seeing that 80% of people watched for three seconds is super depressing, secondly it’s actually misleading because there are a lot of factors of live video that are different than recorded video. For example, people come and go in a live broadcast a lot. Maybe they get a phone call and they were watching on their mobile device, so it interrupts the stream, but they come back. That’s counted as a new session, so while they may have been there for three seconds the first time, got a call, came back and watched for 15 minutes, they’re counting differently so it’s not accumulative. There are many reasons why people may come and go in a live broadcast.
Facebook Live Metrics to Watch
What you should be paying more attention to is the ratio of engagement to viewers. You have 100 simultaneous viewers and if you have two people commenting, not a good ratio. You absolutely want more people commenting and engaging than that. So if you can hit a 20 to 30 percent engagement rate, in other words, 20 to 30 percent of simultaneous viewers are actually leaving comments, you’re doing good. Beyond that, you can consider your streams to be highly engaging.
Do not pay attention to minutes watched unless you’re using it to compare your growth over time. Do however, pay attention to unique viewers. That’ll really give you a better understanding of how many people you’re actually reaching. Here are two guiding principles to remember: One, at the end of the day, your goal with live video should be to create loyal fans for your brand. We would rather see you have 50 viewers watching with a 75% engagement rate rather than 100 viewers watching with a 10% engagement rate. Facebook Analytics will not show you this by the way, so you’ve really gotta use your own analysis on this one. But we believe that this matters more to your growth than any of the insights Facebook will give you and two, we want you to compete against you. Look at where we start, not somebody else and work to constantly improve your metrics. You’re gonna see faster results this way and you’re also gonna get more creative in the process!
