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Facebook and Instagram Video Views
Facebook and Instagram Video Views

Facebook and Instagram video views are now rolled out across CrowdTangle. View data is available on posts, leaderboards, intelligence...

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Written by Tess
Updated over a week ago

Introducing Facebook and Instagram Video Views! 

3/21/2019 Update: Facebook Video Length data is now rolled out across CrowdTangle!

Facebook and Instagram video views are now rolled out across CrowdTangle. View data is available on posts, leaderboards, intelligence, historical data and in notifications. With the addition of this data, publishers can now easily track emerging new trends and best practices on Facebook and Instagram, as well as discover great videos and video creators, see overall video views across their industry, and benchmark themselves directly to competitors.


Video Views FAQs 

How does this data differ from Facebook Insights?
In general, the biggest difference is that this data allows you to see more video view metrics for pages you don't own. That means you can discover videos from other sources, benchmark yourself against your industry, track best practices across a wide array of video creators and more. In terms of measuring your own videos, Facebook Insights gives Page Admins the total number of views on all owned video assets during the timeframe selected. That means views can be included on videos posted **before** the timeframe selected. In CrowdTangle, the data is only looking at **posts made** within the timeframe selected. For more details, see this help article.

What is the difference between total views and post views?
Total views represent the total number of views that a video has gotten. Post views represent the number of views that happen on a specific post from a Page. For instance, say Page X uploads an original video and over the course of a week, Page X's audience watches it (via that post) 9 million times. Page Y sees the video on the first day and shares it with their audience, who watch the video (via Page Y's post) 1 million times. If those are the only two posts of that video, 10 million is the total views (this is also the number you see on the video when watching it), 1 million views are the post views on Page Y's post, and 9 million are the post views on Page X's post.

What is the difference between “views on owned videos” and “views on shared videos”?
Views on owned videos include views on a Page's own posts and views on shares of that Page's posts. Views on shared videos solely include views on videos that a Page shared from another Page.

What about crossposted videos?
On crossposted videos (indicated with a grey “crossposted a video” next to the Page name), the Post Views number refers to video views on that individual post. On the right, "Views incl. crossposted" rolls up all views from the video, including crossposts and shares of that video. By hovering over the donut, you can see the breakdown of views from post, views from shares and crossposted views.

What is the difference between original, shared, and crossposted videos?
Original: The video was created by the page that posted it, and it was only posted to that page.

Crossposted: We do not indicate which Page was the original uploader of the crossposted video. Every instance of the post in a CSV download will be identified as "crossposted." Learn more about crossposting here.

Shared: The video was not created by the page -- it was shared to the page by clicking the Share button from the original video.

When you download a CSV of a list, videos will show up either as original, crossposted, or shared -- an original video will not show up as crossposted in other columns.

How can I calculate the total views on a Facebook video?

Download a CSV of all instances of the video being posted. Then, sum the Total Views column for all instances of original and cross-posted videos, but not shared videos (shared video views may contain overlap with original and cross-posted videos).

What counts as a video view?
We're using the same metric that Facebook uses, which is the number of times a video was watched for an aggregate of at least 3 seconds, or for nearly its total length, whichever happened first (more info here).

Are these views available for organic and paid video views?
These views only count organic views. If a video post is boosted, we do not differentiate views that came from organic vs paid, we show the total views on posts.

Are video views considered a part of Total Interactions?
No. Video views are a separate metric from Total Interactions in CrowdTangle.

How far back in time historically do video views go?
At launch, we will have all video views back to January 1, 2017 — that means Post Views, Total Views on the video, and total across crossposts (where applicable). We are running historical fetches across every video in our system constantly, and will keep moving back in time. We should have full historical view data somewhere around a week after launch.

  • Crossposted videos first appeared in the spring of 2016, so we will only get crossposted data back to then.

  • Post Views have only been calculated since late June of 2016, so we will only have Post View data back that far.

  • Total Views have been calculated as long as videos have been around, so we will have those going back all-time.

  • We backfilled video length data on all FB videos in our database, going back to when video was introduced to Pages.

Can I order my CrowdTangle dashboard by Views?
Yes. On a Facebook dashboard, first select a List or Saved Search and then change the Post Type filter to Facebook Videos. Then, go to your Weights panel on the left and weight by Total Views or Post Views. For Instagram dashboards, first go to any List or Saved Search and then change the Post Type filter to Videos.

Where can I see the breakdown of the number of videos that my Page posted that are owned vs my Page's shares of other Page's videos?
Using CrowdTangle Intelligence, you can input your page, select Facebook Videos and you'll be able to see total video posts with a breakdown between video post types and view sources. You can also find this information in the Leaderboard feature on any List by navigating to the new Owned and Shared leaderboard versions.

How can I see what types of videos perform best?
We recommend setting up daily or weekly digests for your own Pages, or in your competitive set, to get a sense of which videos tend to perform best. You can rank by interaction rate on video posts or by views on video posts. Just make sure to choose video under Advanced Option/Post Type (e.g. Native Video or Live Video for Facebook, or Video for Instagram). Check out these best practices for video notifications here.

How do I see the top ten videos (by views) for my account? For a list? For a search?
In any search or list in your dashboard, make sure to filter the post type to “Facebook Videos” and then you can filter results by either the posts that drove the most views, or the videos that garnered the most total views overall.

How do I set up a notification to get the top videos by views for any of the above?
Notifications continue to work in the same way - you can set up a daily or weekly digest of the top ten videos by views for any Facebook Page, Instagram account, or full list or search. Just make sure to choose Post Type under advanced options, and select a video option. Then, toggle on Custom Weights and select one of the “views” options.

How can I see what performs better: my owned videos or my shares of other videos?
Toggle to the Owned Videos leaderboard to see the total number of views on your owned videos, and then toggle to the Shared Videos leaderboard to see the views on videos you shared from other Pages.

I see that X views came from shares of my post, how do I see which Facebook Pages have shared it?
You can use the Chrome Extension on Facebook Videos to see which other Pages have shared that video. You can also do a Search for facebook.com/YOURPAGENAME, exclude your own Pages using Advanced Search, filter by Facebook Videos, and then you will see all of the other Pages that have shared your videos. You can set up alerts for this as well, so you'll be notified any time another Facebook Page shares your videos. Go to Notifications > Referral Alert to set that up. Please note you will not be able to see how many views the other Pages drove to the video in the Chrome Extension, but that's something we're working on.

How can I see which Pages are driving the most video views for another Page?
Create a new search using a Page's Facebook URL (ex. facebook.com/YOURPAGENAME) as the keyword. Save the search, then go to the Leaderboard of that Saved Search. Sort the results by Views from Page, and select a time range. The leaderboard will show you a full list of Pages that shared videos, ranked by the views they drove.

How can I get rollup numbers for a set of specific videos (for a campaign, or around a certain topic)?
You can do a keyword search if you've used a specific hashtag, but note that CrowdTangle does not pull from the full firehose. Also, the hashtag or keyword would have to be in the caption of the video. Alternatively, you can pull all the videos in the campaign into a Saved Posts list, and then export those posts into a CSV to add up the numbers.

How can I see how my Facebook Live videos are doing vs. my other videos?
You can sort by Facebook Live in the post type dropdown to look at Facebook Live videos separately in the post stream. You can also go to the Leaderboard, hover over the Video Views column on any Page to see the breakout of Live views vs. non-live (VOD) views. If you export the leaderboard, you'll get all of this data in separate columns.

Can I see peak concurrents for my Facebook Live videos?
Not at this time.

Can I see a breakdown of every page my video was crossposted to and how many views it received per page?
Not at this time. We will eventually be able to show all this data. Stay tuned! 

Are Facebook Live post types included in video length?
Facebook Live posts are excluded from the Total Video Time and 3Min+ Video bucket because they are not monetizable. We will make that as clear as possible in the product.

When are you adding video length to Instagram?
We have no plans as of yet to add video length to Instagram.

Can you add watch time or other metrics from Insights?
We have no plans to add watch time or other metrics.

My video length in CrowdTangle is different from what the player shows. What's going on?
It seems so easy to know how long a video is, right? It turns out there are actually lots of different ways to determine the length (e.g. how long the audio is, or how long the visual portion is); and on top of that, different encodings (e.g. MP4, VP9) calculate length differently. So there's a small chance that the length of a video could be slightly off (by a second or two) from what you expect.

Are these new metrics available in an API?
They are not available in the Facebook Graph API or the CrowdTangle API at this time. However, they are still available via an exported version of data into Excel. 

Additional Resources:

Questions? Feedback? Email support@crowdtangle.com
Webinars: Sign up for the next training session! 

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