Understanding OTT Video Analytics - User Engagement And Churn
Written By:- Dulumoni Das
Digital content consumption trends have dramatically changed over the past few years, thanks to increased internet access and lower data costs. According to a report, the number of viewers preferring content consumption on TV over mobile devices has fallen from 52% to 23%. This is a huge shift to online, on-demand channels across all devices.
But then although there has been a massive increase in video entertainment sources, the number of hours per day are still 24. So, the number of hours people can spend attending to the media are limited—they have to work, socialize and take care of their families. So, viewers can’t help but be more selective about the content they consume during the hours they have at their disposal.
It’s easy to infer here why user engagement is so important from a business standpoint.
OTT services must find creative solutions to increase brand loyalty and engagement in a video market increasingly dominated by behemoths like Netflix.
Achieving user engagement is critical for the health of your OTT platform. Here is what you can do to ensure your users stick around
- Understand your audience—
Knowing your users is the first step to success. What is their viewing behavior? What drives their engagement with your service? Is there something you can do to learn about their personalities, interests, and decision-making processes so as to optimize user experience?
You need to find answers to these questions. By doing so, you will have the right information for increasing viewer engagement via your OTT service.
- Offer before they can ask for it—
What are the most useful techniques to drive customer retention on OTT platforms? Sending notifications to users about relevant fresh content and making recommendations based on their taste. Finding the right content to watch is a key consumer need, after all.
Thankfully, it is possible to alert the user about relevant and interesting content without bombarding them with irrelevant recommendations. A powerful, intuitive search function is essential for consumers who feel clueless when searching for content. OTT services must do things proactively to help consumers with the selection process.
Another way is to have a highly curated content library which will make it easy for users to discover the right content. Categorizing content by language, country, theme, mood, or genre can be one amazing way to simplify navigation.
- Keep things simple—
Streaming services must consider the technical abilities of their target audience when designing user experiences. For some audiences, too many features can be confusing. Usability is crucial in the world of OTT. Remember, good user experience is all about making it easy for users to sign up, to find the shows they are interested in, and to watch them.
Personalization can make the interface more user-friendly for older users and less tech-savvy people. It will help reduce friction, improve satisfaction, and encourage loyalty among subscribers.
- Your platform needs to keep getting better with time—
To improve content discovery, your streaming service can also deploy special recommendations and search features. These features include favorites, ratings and separate profiles for different family members. With separate profiles, users can avoid being bombarded with endless irrelevant recommendations.
Yes, helping users find the right content to watch is important, but without a good overall user experience, engagement can dip.
It should be easy for users to choose how they want to watch— with or without ads, TVOD or SVOD. Registering and purchasing should also be as easy and intuitive as possible. Users must be able to seamlessly resume playback from their last device.
Streaming services must ensure that their technology stack is able to adapt to changing customer preferences in order to keep up with their demands. It is crucial to keep users engaged on the platform by having access to actionable data about user engagement. This allows for informed decisions about features that will drive customer satisfaction and retention.
- Offer an excellent user interface—
An average consumer doesn’t really understand what good user experience is. They are happy as long as they can find what they want and love what they find. And that is why customer retention can be affected by a frustrating search experience, or streaming issues.
This is why most successful streaming services put so much effort into making sure the app runs smoothly and delivers video at the highest quality possible. Customer engagement is positively affected by technical performance. Video delivery that is fast and clear can really impress consumers. This increases other metrics such as dwell time. Note that Internet connectivity is the prime determinant of an app’s performance. And hence, it pays huge dividends to optimize your videos so that they run on your users’ devices regardless of the strength of their internet connection.
The world of OTT is all about fulfilling customers’ expectations. This is a tough nut to crack as there is simply no limit to what consumers expect of OTT services. It’s only with the right growth plan and effective user engagement strategies that you can hope to create an impressive audience base.
However, building a consumer base should not be your ultimate goal as an OTT business. Sadly, for any new OTT service, even those that have been around for a while, the focus is often on acquiring new customers. If your customers churn after the free trial, it doesn’t really matter how many users you get.
It’s no hidden fact that top-tier media companies are racing to create immersive OTT experiences. Hence, organizations that are actively into churn analysis and optimize subscriber retention can be expected to be tomorrow’s market leaders.
Now, how do you identify your churn rate and how can you keep it at a reasonable level? Let’s begin with the basics, and then we will work our way up. We provide ott solution provider in india
OTT churn rate— Its implications for OTT services—
The OTT subscription churn rate simply refers to the number of subscribers who cancel or allow their subscription to lapse. They can be classified into one of the following two groups—
- Voluntary churn is when users cancel their subscription. They might have watched the entire series they signed up for, and are now done.
- Involuntary churn occurs when subscribers opt out unintentionally, maybe because their payment method has expired or declined by the service provider. We Provide ott streaming services in india
To bring down churn rate, it’s important to identify the underlying cause and understand where to concentrate efforts—
Examining your subscriber management dashboard is the first step to identifying your churn rates. This will allow you to study your voluntary and involuntary churns separately. Each category will require different approaches.
There’s more to understanding churn than identifying its cause. To determine where to put efforts, providers must compare their conversion rate with their churn rates on a monthly basis. If the churn rate is stable month-over-month, that means you are retaining most of your users. It is then that you can focus on acquiring new ones. If the churn rate is moving upwards, you have a problem.
Analytics give you better insight and help you make better decisions. The best OTT providers have a complete understanding of their viewers and can segment them into different audiences. The user experience a stay-at-home mom looks for is naturally going to be different from that sought by a pro athlete. So, it is invaluable to know your audience and the performance of various user segments.
Once you are thorough with the data, it is time to fix problems.
Addressing the issue of involuntary churn—
Payment service automation is the best way to reduce involuntary churn. Users are alerted when their current payment is about to expire so that they can update their account without having to cancel it. Some services go one step further and communicate with the bank system to update credit card information whenever a new card issue is made.
Such steps may seem insignificant, but reducing churn even by a few percentage points can make a huge difference in revenues earned.
Addressing voluntary churn—
It is not surprising that numbers are important when you consider how to combat voluntary churn. If your user engagement is poor; users are abandoning videos midstream, then the problem must be in the content. This indicates, you need to improve your content. If users abandon the app without opening any videos, it could be a sign of poor user experience. What about those who go on for hours without opening the app? Push notifications might be the solution in this case.
So, there are three factors that determine voluntary churn rate—
- Content— Content becomes the reason behind voluntary churn when your library becomes stale and viewers have watched almost everything available.
- User experience—If users are having difficulty finding content that is relevant to them or if your app is not performing well, they will spend less time there. Low engagement rate is the sign of a negative user experience, and of a higher churn rate.
- Engagement— It is crucial to engage with your users. Let your users know when you add new content. Notifying them via push that you have new episodes is not a hassle, and it will improve their experience with your service.
Final words—
The average OTT user can only afford one to five subscriptions per month. Most users sign up for three or less. In such a scenario, it is easy to lose hope thinking there is no room for new providers. But remember, nothing can beat quality, not even “name.” By having a well-thought-out business plan, understanding problems, working out solutions, and thinking like a customer, emerging as a winner in the OTT world won’t really be an insurmountable hurdle for you.
Mogi White Label OTT Solution
Mogi provides deep video analytics on each and every piece of content you upload with our white label OTT solution. You get to see analytics on user behavior, content popularity, Engagement and bandwidth consumption, so you make an informed choice on what to do next for you OTT business. We also provide our Video Analytics SDK separately, so you can plug it and directly start tracking user behavior on your platforms. Reach out to us for inquiries – susheel.srinivas@mogiio.com