5 Reasons You Need To Use Video Chapters

May 10, 2023

And how to make video chapters better! 

You already know that video chapters are an important part of your video strategy. We can show you ways to make them better for you and your viewers. Discover how to add chapters to any video, how to use YouTube video chapters more effectively, and how chapters are the key to better marketing, sales, and SEO.

• Per-Chapter Analytics
• Audience Retention
• Appropriate Calls to Action
• SEO
• The Content-Marketing Loop

Per-Chapter Analytics

With video chapters, you let your audience have some nice bookmarks and skip the boring bits. What if you could also see who watched what, how many times they went back, and where people skipped or quit? That would really make it worth your while to add chapter titles. 

Analytics are also a good reason to use meaningful titles and not auto-generated bookmarks. Your audience appreciates it as well.

Later, we’ll tell you how to work with YouTube video chapters more easily than ever. Or how to add chapters in YouTube to start with. 

The right technology also lets you use chapters in any standard web video on your site. Even if it’s hosted on a custom streaming server. We can also show you how per-chapter analytics enhance your SEO and Content Marketing efforts. 

And what if you could connect viewers with exact analytics about which topics caught their attention? That would make Sales’ cold-calling a lot warmer!

Audience Retention

You already know that you should measure key moments for audience retention. YouTube’s analytics even show you some nice general information about this. It’s good to know that you have an audience, and that you keep their interest…up to a point.

But if you could see details about which people watched specific chapters, you wouldn’t just create audience retention. You’d see which topics interest your high-value viewers. You could stop chasing general numbers, and make videos that attract top clients and buyers, not tire-kickers and time-wasters.

Appropriate Calls to Action

Today, if you have calls to action on a video, they are either a link in the video description or in the text adjacent to your embedded video. Some providers give you a per-video CTA button. 

What if each video chapter could have one or more CTAs associated with it? 

Your viewers have all their attention on your brilliant video creation. That’s when you need to give them appropriate calls to action. 

What if it was easy to offer further relevant content, start a chat, or open a calendar link right at the moment of peak engagement? That would be better than hoping that your viewers will maybe remember you later and get in touch.

And the right technology can find patterns of individual viewer behavior, and give them more focused offers. For example, someone who loops back through a discussion of setup and then re-watches a pricing-tier section in your product video is feeling a sense of urgency. Shouldn’t you send that viewer a special discount code or other inducements to engage with you right now?

SEO

Each time you create a YouTube video chapter, you create SEO opportunities that should never be overlooked. If you are competing for key-phrases (you are, right?) look for chances to make them into chapter titles. When you embed a video with the right methods, these titles are added to the structured data that a search engine gets from your video. That’s the VideoObject data, if you want to be technical. That information now works with your text to help rank your page.

And of course, if you had the analytics we mentioned above, you could see where actual value lies for your customer base, instead of the larger statistical groupings that typical applications show you. That would help you focus on what your audience is really really searching for.

Better video embedding methods can improve video loading times automatically. If that’s been an SEO headache for you too, we have some suggestions. Read all about that here.

The Content-Marketing Loop

Like your colleagues in SEO, if you are in content marketing, you need accurate and specific feedback. Not vague data like monthly numbers of viewers and pageviews. 

You made a video, you wrote the page text that goes with it on the website. Now you wonder what you got for all the effort? Good video chapter practices and per-chapter analytics will tell you exactly where to focus your efforts for your audience. And you’ll also see which CTAs got all the attention. 

Those analytics and call-to-action results can also give you solid data for your monthly, quarterly, and annual reports. You know you’re doing a good job. Shouldn’t you be able to prove it?

How to Get Started With Video Chapters in AudienceGraph

You can easily create chapters for your videos in your YouTube video description. Sign into YouTube Studio, select the video, open the Description section, and add chapters by entering a timestamp and a title. Don’t forget to start with a timestamp of 00:00.

If you host on YouTube, and you also have the Chrome browser, try our Chrome extension called Chapterlytics that makes adding YouTube video chapters easy. It also makes it simple for you to jump into AudienceGraph. 

Don’t use Chrome but still host on YouTube? Start with AudienceGraph Onramp. We made it easy to add your video’s URL and create video chapters with timestamps and calls to action. You can export the chapters in YouTube’s required format into your video’s description, where they will help viewers in YouTube. 

You or your web team can then paste the code AudienceGraph provides into the appropriate page on your website. Your video, with chapters, calls to action (you added those, right?) and all the rest will appear in a player. It comes complete with the VideoObject code that Google and other search engines can use to help rank your page, as well as those built-in loading-time improvements we mentioned. 

Those per-chapter analytics? AudienceGraph gives you those. The technology to present the right calls to action on the basis of viewer behavior? Our systems can do that as well, if you want.

You don’t host videos on YouTube, but you still want all the reach, power, and ranking? We have you covered! Use the same link above to get started in AudienceGraph. All the chapters, calls to action, and SEO goodness will be there in the player on your web page. How do we do it? Good coding practices, open standards, and some smart people.