Facebook has decided to go big with video! (At least temporarily.) In an effort to take on web video giant YouTube, Facebook has shifted a lot of news feeds focus (by granting amazing organic reach) to videos directly uploaded to its platform. It created a new Videos tab as a default option on every Facebook fan page. It allows fan page admins to designate a Featured Video that resides on the “home page” of your fan page. Facebook’s video ads are crazy-inexpensive, too. And the Insights offered for those direct-uploaded videos continues to improve.

If you’ve always made a point to evaluate the various successes (and not-so-successes) on your fan page, you’ve likely previously become acquainted with fan page Insights and post-specific Insights. Now that video has become such a big focus on Facebook, all those cat videos you uploaded in hopes of achieving viral fame now offer some additional video specific analytics that you didn’t have before.

How to View your Facebook Video Insights

Start by visiting one of the published videos that you uploaded directly to Facebook (meaning, not by sharing a link to a video that resides on YouTube). Click on Options, and then choose Video Insights.

The default view is the Video tab, and the Unique vs Repeat metrics.

The Audience Retention graph displays the percentage of views that are still watching your video at every second of your video. As you drag your mouse along the graph line, Facebook will display the number of seconds and the percentage of views.

In the right column, you’ll see stats like Average View Duration, People Reached, the number of people who viewed your video for at least 3 seconds, and the number of people who viewed your video for at least 30 seconds.

Now change the drop-down menu to view the Auto-Played vs. Clicked to Play stats.

Change the view one more time to see the Paid vs Organic view data.

Switching over to the Post tab, you’ll see all the typical per post analytics data. This same data can be viewed by clicking on the number of people reached on the individual post.

Pro tip: Try to have movement within the first 3 seconds of your video to keep your audience’s attention for longer.

As you experiment further with videos directly uploaded to Facebook, these Video Insights will be invaluable in helping you understand what is working for your specific audience and how to plan future videos.