With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. One of the main features that keeps users engaged on Facebook is video. According to Facebook, over 8 billion videos are watched daily on their platform. This massive viewership leads many brands, media companies and content creators to publish videos on Facebook in hopes of reaching a large audience.
But an important question arises – as a video publisher on Facebook, can you tell when someone watches your video and how much of it they watch? The answer is yes and no. Facebook provides publishers with some key metrics and insights into their video viewership, but the full picture remains hidden.
Video Views Metric
The main viewership metric Facebook provides is “video views.” This counts how many times a video starts playing. According to Facebook, a view is counted when a video is played for at least 3 seconds. This gives publishers a high-level sense of their reach.
However, views don’t tell the full story. You can’t tell from this metric:
- How long people actually watch your video
- If people watch your video multiple times
- If the video plays automatically without user intent
So while views provide a baseline of viewership, they lack crucial context into how people engage with your video content on Facebook.
Average Watch Time
The metric that provides more of this missing context is “average watch time.” As the name suggests, this shows the average duration for which your video is watched. It is calculated by Facebook’s system automatically.
Average watch time gives you a much better sense of true viewer engagement. A video with a high view count but a low average watch time indicates that people aren’t sticking around to watch most of the video. On the other hand, a high average watch time shows that your content resonates with viewers.
However, average watch time has its limitations as well. Since it is an aggregation of all watch times, it doesn’t tell you how many people specifically watched the full video or when people lost interest and dropped off.
Video Insights
To get even more context into viewership patterns, you can access the “Video Insights” data within Facebook Analytics. This shows you graphs with more granular data on how viewership of your video changes over time.
The “Average Percentage Viewed” graph shows the percentage of your video viewers have watched on average up to a certain point. You can see when that percentage starts dropping to get a sense of where you lose viewer interest.
Other graphs show total viewership and average watch time sliced at different intervals. You can see how many people are still watching after 10 seconds, 20 seconds, etc. This gives you a sense of when drop-off happens.
While not perfect, these insights provide much more visibility into real viewer behavior compared to just total views. You can see spikes of interest and drop-off points to improve your video strategy.
Limitations of Facebook’s Data
However, there are still limitations to the viewership data Facebook provides. Some key aspects remain unclear, such as:
- Who specifically watched your full video or dropped off midway?
- How many unique viewers did you have vs. repeat viewers?
- Demographic details like age, gender and location of viewers
Facebook limits analytics to protect user privacy. So you get aggregated insights into overall viewership patterns but not details on individual viewers.
Estimating Unique Viewers
You can try to estimate your unique viewers based on views and average watch time. If your video got 1,000 views and the average watch time is 50%, you could estimate 500 people watched the full video. But this is just a rough guess, not precise data.
Using UTM Parameters to Track Visitors
You can get more precise analytics by getting viewers to your Facebook video from your own website or landing page using UTM campaign tracking parameters. This allows you to track how many visitors came from that specific Facebook video.
For example, when sharing your video link on Facebook, append ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=october to the URL. All visitors with this UTM string will be labeled in your website/landing page analytics as coming from that exact video.
This gives you data like:
- Number of unique visitors from the video
- Which pages they visited on your site
- Their engagement levels and goals achieved
This strategy only works for driving viewers to your owned domains. But it does give you more robust analytics on website visitors from a specific Facebook video. Just keep in mind that these visitors represent a small subset who clicked through to your site.
Facebook Video API
For publishers who want maximum analytics on Facebook video viewership, there is the Facebook Video API. This allows you to access precise viewership data programmatically that is not available through the Facebook interface.
With the Graph API, you can get granular metrics on views, likes, comments and more sliced by different intervals of time. You can segment data by geography, device type, age and gender demographics, and more.
The API provides visibility on unique and repeat viewers of your content over time. You can also get data like drop-off rates by segment to optimize your videos.
The major downside is that accessing the Graph API requires technical resources and coding skills. Larger publishers with dedicated data teams are in the best position to leverage the Video API.
Key Takeaways
In summary:
- Facebook provides high-level data on video views and average watch time.
- More detailed Video Insights give you graphs on viewership patterns over time.
- Limitations remain around unique viewers, demographics, and individual behavior.
- UTM tracking can provide visitor analytics from Facebook to your properties.
- The Facebook Video API gives full programmatic access to granular viewership data.
While Facebook’s built-in metrics do not give publishers complete visibility, they provide valuable directional insights to improve video strategy. For full transparency, leveraging the API is best but requires more technical expertise and resources.
Conclusion
Facebook offers publishers basic analytics into their video viewership through metrics like views and average watch time. More advanced insights are available through Video Insights and the Facebook Video API. However, limitations remain around understanding unique viewers, demographics and individual behavior. Publishers can supplement with UTM tracking from Facebook videos to their own properties. While not perfect, Facebook’s analytics help video publishers improve their content and strategy over time.