Likeability and The Effect on Cost Per Promoted View

Sentiment is the way your audience feels about a particular video. Do they like? Do they hate it? Are they indifferent? How do you know? An easy way to track that is looking at some of your video engagement data on YotTube Analytics. If someone leaves a comment that says “great video” it’s easy to tell that that person liked the video.

What is Video Engagement?

Video engagement is any action a viewer takes while they are watching your video or immediately after. This could be anything from someone subscribing to your channel, Commenting, liking or disliking a video directly on, clicking an annotation, favoriting or sharing a video.

One of the many promoted techniques we use at AboutFace when we’re optimizing a video is Stumbleupon Paid Discovery. We mix our videos in with user generated content based on content topics that users self select that they are interested in. Our video is then served on a native YouTube watch page, so in addition to all of the video engagement actions a user can take from Youtube like subscribing to our channel they also have a chance to rate the video by hitting “Like or Dislike” in the Stumbleupon toolbar.

Stumbleupon Tool Bar

After a couple days I can log in to the Stumbleupon dashboard and see the initial results and make any necessary changes to my targeting based on wether the users are liking or disliking the video.

Stumbleupon Paid Discovery Dashboard Sample

The likes and dislikes then compile what Stumbleupon calls a quality score: “Quality score reflecting a ratio of thumbs up to thumbs down.” so in this example the quality score is 88.7% which is very high. Because the score on this sample was so high in addition to the 2,001 paid stumbles that I bought for a little over $100 the video was well liked enough to get another 1,083 organic stumbles that I paid nothing for. This dramatically lowers the eCPV, which Stumbleupon calls Effective Cost Per Visitor of $0.032 a visitor (normally when we refer to CPV in terms of video it means cost per view).

I can then log in to my YouTube analytics and check out the traffic sources for that particular video (Stumbleupon referrals will show up under ‘External Website’)

Stumbleupon Traffic Source

So in this case my $100.05 netted me 509 targeted views or a cost per view of only $0.19!

But let’s look at another case of a video on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Stumbleupon Low Quality Score

In this case I spent the same $100 and get those same 2,000 paid stumbles and a quality score of 40.0%. This video was not nearly as well received and I only received 2 additional organic stumbles making my Effective Cost Per Visitor $0.05.

Now back to Youtube analytics and I only received 222 views which makes my cost per view skyrocket all the way to $0.45

Views from Stumbleupon

So creating videos that are not well liked is not only punishing you in YouTube’s search algorithm it’s also costing you more to promote them.

Audience Retention can be a great tool as well. YouTube defines this as “an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience”. At AboutFace we sometimes make future editorial decisions or alternative cuts based on peaks and valleys in any given graph. We already know that it’s important to make engaging content, especially with YouTube’s new focus on Time Watched driving their search algorithm, but it’s equally important that people actually like your video and you’re driving viewer engagement. In general the more liked your content is, the longer your audience will watch it.