Eighty-seven percent of professionals use video calls to collaborate and communicate with others at work.
And that's just one use case for video conferencing. People use video calls in both personal and professional capacities, and video conferencing tools are commonly used in everything from dating apps to telehealth and beyond. Just like any other budding industry, the video conferencing space is also becoming saturated.
Product managers in charge of video conferencing tools track dozens of metrics for revenue, user satisfaction, and user engagement. With hundreds of video conferencing tools competing for the same market, those with the highest user engagement are likely to grow.
You can gain deep insights into user behavior, optimize your app's video performance, and foster a highly engaging and satisfying user experience by harnessing the power of the following six video engagement metrics.
1. Meeting Frequency
Meeting frequency is a great metric to track as it provides insights into how actively users are engaging with your video conferencing tool. It indicates the level of adoption and the tool's integration into users' workflows.
You can track this metric by dividing the total number of meetings held per user or per team by a day, week, or month. The frequency will vary from use case to use case. For example, a telehealth app will likely have multiple daily calls as opposed to an app that hosts weekly webinars. Similarly, remote workers have more meetings than on-site workers, so establish a baseline based on your users and industry, and see how your meeting frequency measures up.
Tracking this metric will help you:
- Evaluate usage patterns and identify opportunities to improve your app for better engagement
- Assess the impact of any changes or updates to your video conferencing tool on user engagement and adoption
- Monitor external factors and their impact on meeting frequency
With the help of this metric, you can identify users or teams with low and high meeting frequency. In both cases, reach out to users to understand their challenges, offer support, and provide resources to help increase their engagement and utilization.
If you observe low meeting frequency across the board, you may need to improve the scheduling features of your video conferencing tool. For example, you might streamline the process, enhance reminders, or offer integrations with calendar apps to make scheduling meetings more convenient.
2. Average Meeting Duration
Track the average meeting duration for all your users to understand how they allocate their time during meetings and the level of engagement in their discussions and activities. This metric helps you compare your typical meeting duration with that of industry standards and discover insights into user behavior and preferences. Based on what you learn, you can improve your features to get the average meeting duration up to industry standards.
Sixty-eight percent of workers spend four to 10 hours in meetings every week, but the numbers will vary based on your use case. For example, if your video conferencing tool is primarily used for live, instructor-led training sessions, your average meeting duration will be significantly longer than an app used for personal communication.
Tracking this metric will also help you identify some of the otherwise hidden issues your users may be facing. Imagine a customer support software that uses video conferencing for troubleshooting sessions. By monitoring average meeting duration, you may notice that the support calls are often shorter than or exceed the expected duration. And you may find issues with features such as screen sharing or file transfer that lead to delays or aborted calls.
Armed with your findings, you can collaborate with the dev team to diagnose and resolve the issues with those features, ultimately bringing the average meeting duration to the industry standard for more efficient customer support interactions.
By tracking the average meeting duration, you can also single out the outliers, i.e., excessively short or prolonged meetings, and investigate potential reasons behind them.
3. Meeting Participation Rate
Meeting participation and the sign-up vs. attendance ratio can be tracked together or separately. The meeting participation rate shows the percentage of users who actively participate in meetings as hosts or attendees. The sign-up vs. attendance ratio shows how many of the people who signed up for a meeting actually ended up attending it. Both are helpful for measuring the performance of apps that are used for online conferences, education, webinars, and tradeshows.
Consider an educational platform that offers virtual classrooms through video conferencing. By monitoring meeting participation rates, you may notice that certain students consistently have lower participation rates compared to their peers. Upon further investigation, you may find:
- The students lack familiarity with the video conferencing tool and find it difficult to use
- Issues with the scheduling and invitation process or that reminders don't trigger properly for some students
Armed with these insights, you can provide additional technical support, offer training resources about the video conferencing tool, make scheduling and inviting participants easier, and test the reminder notifications and emails on different devices.
If both your meeting participation rates and the sign-up vs. attendance ratio are low for all customers, you might want to evaluate the onboarding process for new users, including training resources and tutorials. You could also implement targeted engagement strategies such as tailored communication, reminders, or incentives to encourage their active involvement.
4. Active User Rate
Active user rate is as close as it gets to a silver-bullet metric for user engagement. This metric shows you the percentage of users who actively engage with the video conferencing tool within a specific timeframe, such as daily or monthly. It helps you understand your user base and can help identify any drop-offs in usage.
Think of a dating app that uses an in-app video call feature. A steady decline in the number of active users using the video call feature may indicate issues with the feature itself or signal a decline in the total number of people that use the app. In either case, monitoring this metric will help you:
- Identify trends and patterns in user engagement over time, helping you understand the effectiveness of your efforts to drive regular usage
- Take proactive measures to re-engage users, improve features, or address any barriers to usage
For example, you could implement automated reminders or notifications to prompt users to regularly engage with the video conferencing tool.
5. Feature Usage (in Addition to Video)
Track the usage rate for screen sharing, chat activity, and recording features during video calls. This will help you measure the value your users derive from these additional features and how these features enhance their collaboration and communication during video meetings.
Monitoring the usage rate for these complementary features also provides insights into any gaps or opportunities for improvement in the functionality, usability, or accessibility of these features.
Consider a remote team collaboration platform that offers video conferencing. Monitoring the usage rate for screen sharing, chat activity, and recording features may reveal that screen sharing is heavily utilized among teams or the chat feature is underutilized.
By digging deeper and interviewing a few users about both of these features, you may decide to invest in further improving the screen-sharing experience by introducing annotation tools. And you may find out that the way text messages are displayed needs to be changed so that users can write their questions and input in text while someone else is sharing the screen.
Look into user feedback and suggestions regarding complementary features that work with video calling. Engage users in the product development process to ensure that new features align with their needs and preferences, ultimately driving higher adoption and usage.
6. Audio and Video Quality
While not directly an engagement metric, audio and video quality can make or break your customer experience. Track the audio and video quality during all video calls to ensure high standards of clarity, reliability, and overall performance.
Tracking audio and video quality allows you to identify any issues with infrastructure, code, or network connections that may impact the users during meetings and troubleshoot them in a timely manner.
Besides using performance-monitoring tools to track audio and video quality, encourage your users to report issues such as audio disruptions, video freezing, or poor connectivity. Collaborate with your engineering team to upgrade servers, enhance network bandwidth, or implement advanced audio and video codecs for a smooth and high-quality meeting experience.
Use a Third-Party API to Provide High-Quality Video Features
Instead of building your own audio and video chat, choose a customizable third-party API to add a reliable, high-quality video call feature to your app quickly. Stream's video calling API gives you access to a pre-built video conferencing feature that you can use to introduce a highly engaging video feature to your application within days.
The API is SOC2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 compliant and supports everything from one-on-one calling to large conferences with thousands of participants. You can even live stream your video calls and monitor all the important video engagement metrics on a dashboard in real-time.
