What Is Audience Measurement?

In the ever-evolving landscape of app and video streaming, audience measurement plays a pivotal role in helping service providers understand user behavior, preferences, and engagement. Audience measurement is a critical process that involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data related to how your users interact with digital platforms. Trusted by 12 of the world’s 15 largest streaming providers, Conviva offers a robust Operational Data Platform that grants you the capability to actively oversee, control, and enhance your operations. This practice is essential for app and video streaming services, as it enables them to better understand their audience, improve user experiences, and make informed, data-driven decisions.

Why is Audience Measurement Important?

Audience measurement is the backbone of analytics, whether for your app or video streaming service, providing insights that drive content personalization, user engagement, quality improvements, advertising revenue, and overall platform success. As the streaming industry continues to evolve, audience measurement remains an indispensable tool supporting digital platforms in effectively understanding, catering to, and retaining their audiences. Leveraging Conviva’s standardized integrations and user-friendly platform eliminates the need to bog down your own teams with data preparation, comprehension, and translation. Conviva’s time-state technology ensures a seamless process for obtaining granular insights, all the way down to the device and user level, enhancing the efficiency of audience measurement.

1. Content Personalization

Digital businesses need to provide a personalized viewing experience in order to thrive. Audience measurement data helps these platforms understand individual user preferences and behaviors. With this insight, they can recommend content that aligns with each user’s tastes, increasing satisfaction, engagement, and retention.

2. Content Discovery

As the number of apps and video streaming services continue to grow, content discovery becomes challenging. Audience measurement enables these platforms to surface content that is more likely to engage viewers. By analyzing what types of content are popular among different demographics, providers can improve content recommendations and ensure that users discover new and relevant content.

3. Quality of Experience (QoE)

Audience measurement helps providers monitor the quality of the user experience. Metrics related to buffering, playback errors, and successful purchases can be collected and analyzed to ensure that users enjoy a seamless and high-quality streaming experience. Conviva adopts a groundbreaking approach, enabling providers to create customized, stateful metrics that precisely mirror the user experience with their app or video streaming service. This innovative technology provides a tailored and nuanced understanding of your user interactions, allowing companies to glean insights that align closely with their unique goals and priorities.

4. Viewer Engagement

Understanding viewer engagement is vital for digital platforms. Audience measurement provides insights into how long your viewers watch a video, which scenes are most engaging, and when viewers drop off. This information helps platforms make improvements and retain viewer interest.

5. Ad Effectiveness

For ad-supported app and video streaming services, audience measurement is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Providers can track metrics like ad completion rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to assess their impact. Accurate data on viewer behavior enables better targeting and ad placements, resulting in higher revenue.

6. User Experience Improvement

By analyzing how users navigate and interact with the platform, apps and video streaming services can identify pain points and improve the user interface and experience. Within Conviva’s platform, you gain the capability to assess metric performance across a spectrum of dimensions, including operating systems, geolocations, and browser versions which facilitates efficient problem detection and rapid root-cause analysis. Notably, Conviva’s AI alerts proactively notify you of specific issues, along with detailed notes on what triggered the issue, preempting the need for extensive investigation and enabling timely intervention.

7. Subscriber Insights

Audience measurement helps digital platforms identify patterns in viewer behavior that may indicate subscriber churn. By detecting when subscribers sign up, how long they remain active, and why they might decide to cancel their subscriptions, service providers can take proactive measures to retain customers.

8. Competitive Advantage

In the highly competitive marketplace for apps and streaming services, accurate, granular, real-time audience measurement data provides a competitive edge. Platforms that can offer a superior user experience are more likely to attract and retain subscribers. By achieving continuous and comprehensive audience measurement, Conviva’s platform equips providers to unravel time-sensitive issues with just a few clicks through our intuitive UI. Our approach traces your users’ entire journey, detailing every step they take on the app from login to completion. Utilizing this comprehensive data, you can effectively cluster audiences based on content affinities, yielding more precise and actionable insights to inform strategic decisions.

How To Measure Audience Engagement

Audience measurement in streaming analytics is a complex process that involves the collection, analysis, and interpretation of vast amounts of data to understand how users interact with digital platforms. It empowers digital platforms to provide a personalized, high-quality user experience, and make data-driven decisions to enhance user engagement and content performance.

1. Data Collection

User Activity Tracking: The process starts with the tracking of user activities. Whenever your users engage with your platform, their actions are logged. This includes actions like video play, pause, rewind, and fast forward. Conviva’s Operational Data platform goes one step further in deciphering more complex data such as how many of your users have high video start up time due to slow server responses, what percent of your users are able to successfully log in to their account on their first attempt, and what the average time is for your user to subscribe. Conviva monitors moments that truly matter, all in real-time.

Device and Platform Information: Data regarding the devices your users use (smartphones, tablets, smart TVs) and the platforms (apps, websites) they use to access the content is collected. This information is essential for understanding the context of viewership.

Demographic and User Profile Data: When your users provide consent, demographic information such as age, gender, location, and interests may be collected. This data helps in creating user profiles and understanding the characteristics of your audience.

2. Real-Time and Historical Data

Audience measurement involves collecting both real-time data and historical data. Real-time data provides immediate insights into viewer behavior and performance, while historical data allows for trend analysis and pattern identification over time. 

Conviva’s advanced time-state technology makes it possible to identify root causes for any issues that arise, understand why, and take appropriate action in a matter of seconds. Data from various, complex systems is converted to a unified, synchronized, and continuous timeline, making it seamless to overlay all the information and immediately correlate cause and effect for ongoing improvements. Detailed ​​reports and visualizations are created to communicate these findings.

Common Audience Measurement Metrics

The following measurement metrics are the building blocks of app and video streaming analytics. By closely analyzing these data points, providers can garner a comprehensive view of viewer behavior, content performance, and the overall user experience. Every minute your users spend facing login hurdles or access issues with high-value content on your platform translates to lost revenue.

It is imperative that real-time monitoring and resolution of experience issues take precedence. Conviva excels in transforming experience, performance, and engagement data into operational metrics in real time, streamlining the process of in-depth root-cause analysis so you can proactively address issues that impact user experience, ensuring a responsive and revenue-optimized platform.

1. Views and Plays

Total Views: The total number of times a video is initiated or started by your user. This metric provides an overall measure of a video’s popularity and reach.

Playthrough Rate: The percentage of your users who watch a video from start to finish. It helps assess how engaging, relevant, and compelling the content is.

Peak Concurrent Viewers: The maximum number of simultaneous users during a live stream or a specific time frame.

2. Watch Time

Total Watch Time: The cumulative amount of time your users spend watching a specific video. This metric helps identify which content keeps your users engaged for longer durations.

3. Viewer Retention

Audience Drop-Off: An analysis of when and where your users stop watching a video. Understanding viewer retention helps pinpoint which parts of the content may need improvement. 

4. Demographics and Audience Segmentation

Age and Gender: Understanding the age and gender distribution of your audience helps tailor content and advertising to specific segments.

Geographic Location: Knowing where your users are located allows for geo-targeted content and ad delivery. 

5. Devices and Platforms

Device Usage: Information about the devices your users use to access content, such as smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, or desktop computers.

Platform Preferences: Data on whether your users access content through mobile apps, websites, or other platforms.

6. Quality of Service (QoS)

Buffering Rate: The frequency and duration of buffering or loading interruptions during video playback. Lower buffering rates indicate a smoother viewing experience.

Video Resolution: Metrics related to video quality, such as resolution and bitrates. Higher video resolution and quality typically result in a better viewing experience.

7. Ads

Ad Completion Rate: The percentage of your users who watch an entire video advertisement without skipping or abandoning it.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of your users who click on links or advertisements to learn more or take further action.

8. Content Performance

Popular Content: Identification of the most-watched or highest-rated content through likes, comments, and shares. This helps in content curation and recommendation algorithms.

Drop-Off Points: Analysis of your user drop-off points within videos to identify less engaging sections. Understanding this helps optimize video length and content structure.

9. User Journey

User Acquisition: Tracking the sources through which your users discover and access content.

User Behavior: Mapping the stages your users go through, from discovery to engagement, and finally to desired actions such as subscribing to your platform.

10. Subscription & Login Experiences

Time to Subscription / Login: Total length of time needed for your user to achieve a successful login or subscription on your platform. This metric helps identify issues that might block revenue generation and user engagement.

Subscription / Login Success Rate: The percentage of users successfully achieving a subscription or login on your platform. Changes to this metric indicate problems in platform processes that might block users from accessing content.

11. Retention and Churn

Churn Rate: The rate at which your users stop using the platform, engage with content or cancel their subscriptions. High churn rates are a red flag, indicating poor user retention and satisfaction levels.