One of our favorite features of the new Prezi Next platform is the presentation analytics. With this feature, salespeople, marketers, social media managers and anyone looking to share a presentation will no longer have to wonder whether someone actually viewed their slides because Prezi will track if, when and how viewers are engaging with the presentation content!

Analytics is a native element of a Prezi Next premium subscription—meaning there are no third-party programs to upload the presentation to, no additional subscription fees to pay or tedious landing pages to create just to see how a presentation is performing. With a few simple clicks, users can share their Prezi presentation and begin collecting metrics on number of viewers, total view time, number of seconds spent on each slide and other data in real time – delivering important insights into how the audience is reacting to the presentation.

As an Independent Prezi Expert company, we’ve been working in Prezi Next since its beta release this summer and have run small-scale experiments with the analytics previously, but this Halloween we decided to launch a more full-scale campaign to test how the analytics performed and explore what insights we could gather from the collected data.

In the days leading up to Halloween, we designed an exciting “Top 10 Halloween Movies” presentation using Prezi Next and promoted it via our newsletter and social media channels to see what kind of engagement we’d receive. In total, our presentation received 71 views and delivered plenty of interesting data – so we’re sharing our experience to help you get a better sense of how this new Prezi Next feature works and why analytics could be valuable for your next presentation!

1. Starting a Campaign

Create a Prezi Next presentation

The first step is to sign up for a Prezi Next Premium license and create a presentation with the new platform. Currently Prezi prices this subscription at $59 per month billed annually and it’s also included as part of a Prezi Business team license package.

Prezi Next utilizes a new type of layout, structure and core technology than the original edition of Prezi, so the good news is it will now be completely Flash-independent (yay!) but the tradeoff is it’s unlikely there will be an automatic way to convert existing Prezis to the new platform. Prezi Next was designed to be more closely aligned with traditional slideshow creation tools than its predecessor though, so most users will find it easier to begin creating presentations than with the current Prezi platform.

Generate an Analytics link

Once you’ve created a Prezi Next presentation, the rest is easy. Simply click on the “Analytics” tab at the top of the dashboard, then click the “Create new link” button. You’ll select the presentation you want to track and then name the campaign—generally by listing the person, company or outlet you plan to share the presentation with.

You can also can select an option that requires viewers to identify themselves so they would have to provide a name and email address before being able to access the Prezi.

Share!

Once you’ve generated the campaign link, you’re ready to share it! You can send it via email, direct message, share it on social media…the possibilities are endless.

Of course, it’s important to consider the purpose of a campaign—for more targeted sharing (like sending to a specific client), you’ll want to generate a link that you only share once, but for broadcast-style campaigns (like this example), you’ll want to share the same link on all your communication channels so the analytics are collected in the same report.

Insights for this stage:

• Get used to creating campaigns! Even if you’re only sharing a presentation with a single user, creating a campaign allows you to see if your recipient ever opened the link you shared and if so, what slides he/she interacted with most.
• Campaigns are especially powerful for social sharing because likes, favorites, retweets, etc. don’t actually measure whether or not a user engaged with the content you shared, but simply that they reacted to the post. Analytics campaigns will tell you how many people truly accessed the presentation and potentially even who they are (if you use the required name and email option).

In the days leading up to Halloween, we promoted our “Top 10 Halloween Movies” presentation on our newsletter and social media – ultimately registering 71 total views from 61 original viewers.

We’ve broken the resulting data down into two categories—the first category represents information Prezi provides automatically in its dashboard and the second category represents information we were able to discover via a more in-depth analysis of the provided data.

Analytics Data (auto-generated): Prezi Next*

*results based on Halloween social campaign from Oct 26-Oct 31, 2016

• Average presentation completion rate: 65%
• Number of views: 71
• Number of viewers: 61
• Total view time: 1 hour 11 min
• Page view summary
  • Average amount of time spent on each slide (total – in seconds): see image below
  • Average amount of time spent on each slide (by user – in seconds): see image below 

Additional Insights (via data analysis): Prezi Next*

*results based on Halloween social campaign from Oct 26-Oct 31, 2016

• Engagement levels
  • Percentage of viewers who completed the entire presentation: 57%
  • Percentage of viewers who started but didn’t finish the presentation: 13%
  • Percentage of viewers who never progressed past the first slide / landing page: 30%

• Average engagement time (per viewer)
  • Based on provided data: 1 minute 0 seconds
  • Based on filtered data**: 1 minute 1 second
    • **removed outliers that spent multiple minutes on starting / ending slides or never started presentation
  • Longest individual view time:
    • Based on provided data: 16 minutes 4 seconds
    • Based on filtered data: 2 minutes 26 seconds
  • Most common dropoff slide:
    • For this campaign, there were no specific trends as every viewer dropoff happened on a different slide number.

There you have it—the core results from our first large-scale analytics experiment with Prezi Next. Now what do those analytics tell us? Continue to section 3 “Campaign Insights” to find out!

3. Campaign Insights

Which movies were most engaging?

Of course, the primary takeaway for our Halloween campaign was to see how viewers interacted with the movies on our list! The following chart gives us a breakdown showing how each movie slide performed based on total engagement time (in aggregate based on all views) and by individual viewer preference (longest engaged slide of viewer’s session).

Of note, the first measurement was provided by Prezi automatically while the second was based on our manual analysis of the viewer data.

(CLICK IMAGE TO EXPAND)

So what did we learn?

• In general, engagement time and preference followed the trend of the original slide order, although there were exceptions of movie slides over and under-performing their original “rank” (indicated by +/- signs on graphic).
• In the “Total Engagement Time” analysis, the top over-performers were Friday the 13th and The Shining while notable under-performers were A Nightmare on Elm Street and Alien. 
• In the “Unique Viewer Preference” analysis, the top over-performers were The Thing, Friday the 13th, The Shining and The Addams Family while notable under-performers were A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Evil Dead and Alien. 
• In both measurements, the first movie listed Halloween had the highest engagement levels at 3 minutes 22 seconds and 12 instances of being the top viewed movie of a unique viewer’s session.
• Coincidentally, The Shining and The Nightmare Before Christmas tied for second place in both measurements – exactly 2 minutes 49 seconds in total engagement time and 5 instances of being the top viewed movie of a unique viewer’s session.
• The top 4 slides ended up being the most engaged with in both analyses, although The Shining and The Nightmare Before Christmas both outperformed slide #2 Alien. 
• In total engagement time, Friday the 13th outperformed its slide rank significantly by posting a score of 2 minutes 14 seconds (+5 spots), despite being the top viewed slide by viewer only once.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street was the least engaged movie slide in both analyses despite being listed as slide #5 in the slide sequence.

How could we improve this campaign?

• For this presentation, we don’t know exactly what the implications of more or less engagement time are—there’s a possibility users were simply spending more time reading certain descriptions or were interested in some pictures more than others. In the future, we could redesign this presentation to be less linear and more “clickable,” meaning users could select certain movies from the starting screen based on their interest levels—making the data less dependent on the original slide order and more on viewer preferences.

For an example of a “clickable” presentation, check out our Sli.do + Puffingston Prezi design:

• If this were an ongoing presentation, we could A/B test it by creating a second version of the presentation with the movies in different orders and a new campaign to pair with it. We could then compare trends between the two campaigns to see if there is a correlation on which movies are under or over-performing compared to their original slide order.
• If we made each movie feature slightly longer (2-3 slides instead of 1), we may be able to better analyze which movies viewers were most interested in. Because each movie was represented by only a single slide in this presentation, the differentiation between “interested” and “disinterested” engagement levels may have only been a few seconds—making it difficult to identify actual trends.
• We would also want to examine our relatively high dropoff rate (30%) for visitors who never progressed past the first slide / landing page – potentially by setting the Prezi to auto-load instead of requiring a manual click of the “Present” button or by embedding the Prezi in a more attracting landing page via iFrame code instead of using the default Prezi-generated link.

Thank you for checking out our writeup on our first large-scale Prezi Next analytics campaign! We hope our experience gives you ideas and insights on creating your own campaign to gather valuable metrics on how audiences are engaging with your presentations.

Need help creating your own Prezi Next presentation or setting up a campaign? Let’s connect! 

Stay tuned for PART 2 of this Prezi Next analysis featuring more insights on:

• Making the most of Real-time Slack notifications
• Using Slide-level performance scores to improve your presentations
• Leveraging Viewer engagement insights in client / prospect interactions

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If you’re interested in learning more, check out our PREZI DESIGN or PREZI TRAINING pages!