3 Ways to Boost Video ROI with Captions

Captions are essential for accessibility and well liked by many viewers, but most importantly for marketers, they are a powerful piece of video data that improve video ROI.

By using a professional video captioning service, you can ensure high-quality captions that will incur numerous benefits. Below are the key 3 ways to boost video ROI with captions.

1. Better Watch Times

The first of the 3 ways to boost video ROI with captions is to increase watch time. Watch time is not only important for communicating your ideas or call to action, it is also a main consideration for search engines when ranking your video. Search engines view watch time as an indicator of quality video content. More time spent watching means higher quality content and results in a higher search ranking.

Both Google and YouTube use watch time as a primary factor for ranking, rather than relying on the number of video views. Google even patented Watch Time Based Ranking, in which the more and longer a user watches a video, the higher the Google ranking will be. This increased emphasis on watch time pushes companies to provide content that fosters deeper interaction.

Captions have been proven to encourage this interaction and increase watch time for all viewers. Recent trials from leading online publishers revealed a 40% increase in video viewing when videos were captioned. They also found that viewers were 80% more likely to watch a video to completion when closed captioning and multi-language subtitling were available. Facebook’s internal tests showed that captioned video ads increased view time by an average of 12%.

Captions correlate with longer watch times for various reasons. For many video viewers, the environment they are in does not allow them to turn on or hear the sound. For others, captions make video viewing more enjoyable.

Ofcom, the communications regulator in the UK, found that 80% of people who used closed captions had no hearing loss. And for the many viewers whose first language is not English, captions enable a fuller understanding of video.

If you really want to improve video ROI and get your videos seen, you’ve got to make captions your best friend. But what else do they do? Let’s take a look.

2. Wider Reach

A sure fire way to improve video ROI is to get more people watching. There are 360 million people worldwide that have some form of disabling hearing loss. In the U.S., 13% of the population is deaf or hard of hearing.

Captions are necessary for providing these individuals access to your videos. Many government departments and educational institutions are required by Federal law to caption all multimedia content. In business, it is not only ethical and non-discriminatory to caption video content, but it is also smart to do, as your marketing efforts will reach a much larger audience.

Additionally, there are over a billion people worldwide who speak English as a second or foreign language who will have access to your videos if they are captioned. Offering subtitles is another great way to reach the growing global market; a whopping 2 billion internet users speak languages other than English.

On YouTube specifically, 80% of the views come from outside the US. You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population). Captioning and subtitling your company’s video to meet the needs of this vast and growing audience is key to improving your viewer base and engagement rates. If you are a globally reaching company, appealing to international audiences is essential.

With an increased audience base who is now able to watch, understand, and interact with your videos, the return on investment skyrockets.

3. Increased Engagement

More eyes on your videos combined with longer watch times create the perfect environment for increased user engagement. Companies that have added captions to their existing online video content have seen an immediate 14% lift in engagement on social media. This increase in engagement means more people will like, comment on, share, and retweet your videos.

Why does this matter? By sharing content, viewers are actively endorsing your videos and delivering them to their network of online friends. This signals to search engines that you are publishing quality content and is the tech version of the word-of-mouth marketing that drives new business for a brand.

Increased engagement is cultivated by captions in many ways. Captions aid viewer focus, make videos more digestible for various kinds of people, and provide a way to watch videos in sound-sensitive environments. Because of this, viewers are more attuned to the message of your videos and much more likely to interact with them.

Consider this: most people who use captions do not do so because of a hearing impairment. Rather, captions let viewers focus on the content and better comprehend the information, so much so that a San Francisco State University professor saw grades increase by a full GPA point after captioning all educational video.

This improved comprehension is due to the fact that captions solve many of the obstacles that come with watching video. Captions clarify the dialogue when the speaker has a dialect, technical terms are used, the audio is muffled or too quiet, or the environment is too noisy. Additionally, research has found that deaf and hearing viewers have a higher likelihood of forming a positive response to videos when the videos are captioned.

The ability of captions to generate viewer interaction and engagement is powerful for your SEO strategy, allowing you to improve video ROI.

Enhanced Video ROI is Yours with a Professional Video Captioning Service

So we’ve talked about the 3 ways to boost video ROI with captions, but how do you get those captions on your videos? The best captioning practices to improve video ROI are to use closed captions and to enlist a professional video captioning service who can provide you with high quality, 99% accurate captions.

For information on captioning basics and how to choose the right professional video captioning service, check out our blog post: Video Captioning Basics for Compliance and ROI.