BARCELONA—At a time when consumers are voicing increased complaints about their streaming services, a new survey finds that employees at streaming service providers are unhappy with some of the tools and technologies they use for product analytics that would help them better understand how consumers are reacting to their services.
NPAW’s new B2B survey State of Video Product Analytics 2023 found that a whopping 92% of respondents (employees at streaming providers at the director level and above) are not fully satisfied with the third-party tools they use to measure product success.
The main reasons for this dissatisfaction stem from the tools’ inability to track across all the devices in the providers’ offering (a concern for 32% of respondents) and a lack of video content monitoring capabilities (40%), the NPAW report found.
“In today’s fiercely competitive streaming market, the success of video products largely depends on a business’s ability to make decisions rooted in fact and driven by audience interests and behavior," said Jordi Bartomeu, NPAW’s chief strategy officer and head of product analytics. "To do so, they need an analytics tool that can capture all the complexities of online video and track users across the entire customer lifecycle, helping them design user journeys that deliver increased engagement and stable growth.”
Product analytics software solutions have evolved to help product owners, business and operations, and content and marketing departments measure and improve the performance of digital products. However, the video streaming industry presents a unique set of measurement needs and challenges that a broad-purpose tool might not cover.
Other key findings from the survey include:
- 50% of respondents prefer third-party product analytics tools for tracking video product performance and user behavior, while 26% leverage in-house tools or experts, and 24% use a combination of both
- Only 8% of respondents are highly satisfied with the third-party product analytics tool they use to track video product performance, with the rest expressing some level of dissatisfaction
- The dissatisfaction with third-party product analytics tools is mainly due to their inability to track end-user insights across all offered devices (48%), and a lack of video content monitoring capabilities (40%)
- The top metrics for video product performance are user engagement (32%), user experience (31%), and customer acquisition (28%), followed by feature usage (27%). Tracking priorities vary across departments
- Three-fourths of respondents use analytics tools to track users at risk of churn based on user behavior. Of these, 50% employ a third-party analytics tool, while 25% have developed one in-house
- The biggest blockers to using video product data effectively are managing data security and protection (48%) and processing vast amounts of data into actionable insights (44%). Perceived challenges vary across regions
The full report is available here.
