Facebook’s new video metrics focused on 360 degree videos

Facebook has launched a set of new video metrics that allow publishers to keep a tab on the performance of their videos by analyzing the audience and its preferences. The networking giant is also enabling a guide and heat map for videos in a bid to give a fillip to 360-degree videos on its site.

Making the announcement, Facebook wrote in a blog post, “These updates give publishers actionable data to help them create videos that forge stronger relationships with their viewers and engage new audiences.”

The new video metrics aimed at a better understanding of users include parameters like demography of audience, live video engagement, and statistics of videos which people share with their friends. The stats can be neatly classified according to age, gender, and location of the audience. Publishers can also compare video performance of a specific video on that page across different demographics.

While there is a metric exclusively for live videos, publishers can also evaluate the performance of their original video on the page with the video copies that were shared by people.

After breaking down views and minutes of the original video post versus shares and crossposts of the video, they can get an idea of what kind of content people usually share and how can this sharing can affect the performance of their videos.

Because 360-degree videos are a new feature on Facebook, often viewers do not know from what angle they should watch to get a complete view. So, it has allowed the video creators to include a Guide which can “set a default path for the viewing window to move through in order to create a lean-back experience.”

The publishers can use the option “Enable Guide” under 360 Controls tab while uploading a 360 video and can select specific spots in the video which they want people to see. Also, if you want to view a video on your own without any guide, you always have the option to opt out of the guide.

The heatmap feature can tell publishers where viewers looked inside their 360 videos. Heatmap is a visual map that can detect most viewed angles by viewers whenever they shift more than 30 degrees.

However, this feature will only be applicable to videos published after late April and having more than 50000 views. Video publishers can find Heatmap in the Video Library’s Publishing Tools for each video.