Tips for Measuring and Analyzing Your Videos with Elizabeth Pierce

If you’re producing video after video, you need to know how well they’re doing.

Are they effective? Is there room for improvement? Do they cover everything they need to?

You won’t know unless you measure and analyze your videos!

Elizabeth Pierce, Senior Director of Learning Experience and Consulting at TaskUs, joined The Visual Lounge to share her thoughts behind measuring video engagement.

Elizabeth has 20 plus years of experience working in the learning and development space as a fantastic leader and advisor. She’s dedicated to driving a progressive learning culture throughout organizations to meet company, customer, and employee goals for strategic growth. She’s worked with big names such as Walmart, Oracle, Uber, Eventbrite, and Glassdoor.

You can watch the video on this topic at the top of this post, to listen to the podcast episode, hit play below, or read on for more…

Getting clear on company goals

One of the biggest areas of focus for Elizabeth is to get clear on the goals of your leadership team or client. When trying to achieve any real change with learning, you need to figure out the potential roadblocks to reaching those goals.

“Always look at the overall business, and then how training can plug and play and actually support the business and support those goals and how they want to move forward.”

Elizabeth likes to dive into the details here. She says the best way to deliver training is to look at the goals for each company division and get clear on what behavior changes and knowledge checks the company needs.

“It really is about supporting the whole business and what training we can provide that would support the business and have an impact to help it reach those goals faster, but also in a robust way.”

A good collaborative team effort is key

When it comes to producing effective instructional videos for businesses, it’s always a team effort. Elizabeth works with some fantastic instructional designers and content writers who collaborate really well together.

“You need to make sure that you hire the right people in the right roles. And there are amazing instructional designers that are on my team and content writers…and there’s no way I could do that. They’re amazing. They have a very collaborative environment, and we really encourage that.”

According to Elizabeth, one of the most important things to remember as a leader is that your team needs to know what they’re working towards. That’s where communication becomes key.

“One of the key things is that as a leader, you make sure that your team actually knows what the end game is. So communication is absolutely 100% key.”

How to test for engagement

How do you ensure that the viewers of your video have absorbed the information?

Elizabeth says: quiz them!

The simplest way to check that the information has been absorbed is to have a knowledge check at the end of the video. This achieves three key things:

  1. It ensures they paid attention
  2. It means it sunk in
  3. It reinforces that training is not just a one-and-done experience

“If you don’t have a quiz or you don’t have a knowledge check, like, that’s a huge mess.”

If you really want the information to sink in, an even better way to test it is to do a little refresher a few days later with a new mini knowledge check quiz.

How to deliver content that drives engagement

Another thing to bear in mind if you’re trying to boost engagement is how you deliver the information. Throwing together a slideshow with hundreds of slides isn’t going to lead to high engagement and knowledge retention.

Elizabeth says that the knowledge check is only part of the work. The content itself needs to be engaging enough so people can retain the information.

“So many times, I’ve walked into companies, and it’s basically been like, 300 slides, and then they just throw it into an eLearning. That’s not very helpful. Because then I’m just sitting there looking at slides, and I don’t even know what I need to retain. And I don’t know why I need to retain it.”

Video vs. PowerPoint vs. eLearning modules

300-slide PowerPoint presentations are probably not the best way to deliver information, but is video always the solution?

Elizabeth loves video because it can tell a story. While you can do something similar with static images on a PowerPoint presentation, it’s just not the same. Video, she says, is much more entertaining and easier to remember.

“People tend to remember things that are more interactive, versus looking at a static slide that’s not necessarily the most interactive way of doing something. So I’m a huge fan of video.”

What true engagement looks like

Tips for Measuring and Analyzing Your Videos with Elizabeth Pierce

The word engagement can mean a few different things. For some, it means interactivity. It means sharing the video, responding to it, putting the ideas into action. But interactivity isn’t the only way to measure engagement.

Elizabeth’s definition of engagement in this context is “engagement in terms of the space.”

She defines it by asking, “is that person staying in the experience? Are they clicking around and moving around to different spaces? Are they retaining something? And they able to answer a quiz question?”

She gives an example of an anti-harassment training session she found that had highly engaged, scenario-based videos that were also a bit funny because the scenarios were so obviously wrong.

This led to them recommending other managers to take the training, when usually, HR would have to track people down to get them to take it.

“They found the training was super engaging and certain aspects of it were kind of funny because it was like, why would you ever do that? So it was kind of self-populated, and everybody ended up taking it. I think it was a 99% rate of accomplishment.”

Other ways to measure engagement

Oftentimes, measuring the effects of videos and training is hard to put into hard numbers. There’s always a qualitative aspect to it.

However, there’s plenty of data ready to look at. It’s just not always immediately apparent. Elizabeth talks a little about hidden data points that you can look at in the wider business.

For example, if a business has a high staff turnover rate, better training can help to reduce that, which is something that can be clearly measured.

“My first training job, the CEO would walk by my desk and be like, “we’ve got a problem in the call center, 40% turnover rate, fix it.” So basically, I had to figure out how to fix it. And I was like, well, where’s it coming from? Why do we have that 40% turnover rate? So that goal for the company was to get that turnover rate reduced. So I fixed it.”

What to consider before creating a learning management system

There are lots of things to consider before creating an LMS. Elizabeth takes us through some of the most important questions to ask ourselves.

  1. Who is the client, and what does the company need?
  2. Who is the audience?
  3. What is the skill set of the learning team?
  4. What’s the complexity of the training?
  5. How will the training be rolled out, and to how many people?

“There are so many different things that you need to consider for the best LMS. No one LMS fits best for any one space.”

The challenges of remote training

In the era of COVID, the way many companies conduct training changed drastically overnight. In some cases, there were layoffs in training teams, and there was a lack of experts delivering the training.

Another way things have changed is that companies now rely on eLearning to replace what would have been in-person training. But the content itself wasn’t built for eLearning, so it didn’t have the same effect.

“They were throwing all these decks that were normally facilitated in-person with activities and were super engaging, and just threw them into eLearning. You’re sitting there, and you’re clicking through the slides, but you’re not getting that engagement level.”

So this is definitely something to be aware of because training sessions are going to look different, and the level of engagement has changed. There are all sorts of distractions to contend with when people are at home, such as children or pets running around. 

That’s why TaskUs prioritizes wellness and breaks training up into more manageable chunks. This helps engagement rather than hinders it because it’s more realistic for people to manage.

If you’re ready to start creating engaging videos that get the results that you want (either in-person or remotely), be sure to check out TechSmith Academy. It’s full of resources to help you get started and create amazing videos.

For more expert advice and tips visit TechSmith Academy on YouTube or listen to the Podcast.

Matt Pierce

Matt Pierce is a Learning & Video Ambassador at TechSmith. In this role speaks and teaches about video creation and visual communication. A graduate of Indiana University he has ten years of experience working in learning and development with a focus on visual instruction. He has directly managed the training, user assistance, video, and other teams for TechSmith. Teach him something @piercemr

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