Managing Drop Offs in Videos

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Table of content
  1. Introduction
  2. Form a structure
  3. Keep some intrigue
  4. Wrap up with a call to action
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90 Seconds
8 years ago・2 min read

You’ve decided that your business would benefit from video content, you have an idea of what message you want to get across to your audience but you don’t know how best to get that message across and in what sort of time frame. Follow this simple principle to achieve a higher retention rate during your video playback.

Form a structure

I’ll start by saying, there are no concrete rules but it’s wise to be aware of video drop off when forming a structure for your video content.

Let’s take a product video as an example.

The key is getting across the purpose of the product within the first 10-15 seconds of the video,

Hello audience, here is the product and this is what it does/looks like…

You will lose a percentage of viewers in the early stages of your video. But you want to keep those numbers down to a minimum.

Keep some intrigue

Feed them a little information but keep some intrigue, you want them to stay tuned.

Developing your concept throughout the next 45-60 seconds is a comfortable amount of time but thereafter we are entering into a drop off point where you may lose a large percentage of viewers.

This can be partially explained by the tolerance certain audience members have when viewing the web-based video which they may not necessarily be initially interested in.

It’s very easy for a viewer to become distracted and the behaviors of viewers are something which has been observed many times in recent years since the boom of online video.

Wrap up with a call to action

We’re getting close to the 90 seconds point for the video duration and really the message should be delivered by now. This point is crucial for wrapping up your video and finishing with a call to action (CTA).

Supporting video content can run for much longer if necessary but you can’t expect all viewers to stick around for ten minutes whilst you tell them how good your latest product or service is.

Get to the point nice and early, deliver a bit more over time and then wrap it all up within 90 seconds. It’s a good principle to stick to when creating a wide reaching, web based video.

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