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Enable Microsoft Teams Analytics & Reporting for Live Events

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Viktoria Bengtsson
Enable Microsoft Teams Analytics & Reporting for Live Events

Are you using Microsoft 365 at your company? If so, you might be aware of the capabilities that Microsoft provides in terms of broadcasting live events. Most companies have embraced video in past years to communicate to the workforce. If you haven’t – you’re very likely embracing it since 2020. And whether you’ve been broadcasting live events for a short time or for several years, you understand the need for rich analytics and reporting. You want to truly measure the impact of these broadcasts. However, you might not be aware of the analytics and reporting tools that are available for Microsoft Teams Live Events?

What we hope you get out of this blog post is that you get a good understanding of the tools that Microsoft provides to help you broadcast and live stream messages to your employees. And thereby, keep them engaged.

And we also want you to get an idea of how Hive Streaming Analytics can help you improve your internal video communication strategy and track employee engagement. Regardless of whether you use Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or Stream (or a combination thereof) to broadcast these live events.

This is what we’ll cover:

  • Why are Microsoft and Hive Streaming such a good match?
  • A sneak peek of Hive Analytics (Yammer, Stream, and Microsoft Teams analytics and reporting features)

Prefer video format? Check out the recorded webinar from June 2020 here that focuses on these topics.

Why are Microsoft and Hive Streaming such a good match?

Microsoft is a leader in the enterprise video communications space and continues to find ways to empower its customers to communicate effectively with video.

Whether it is with legacy Skype Meeting Broadcast, the current offerings of Live Events in Teams, Stream, and Yammer, or cutting-edge features like Teams Overflow – Microsoft will continue to innovate to address the needs of its customers.

Hive Streaming has been fortunate to work side by side with Microsoft as they continue to evolve their video streaming offerings.

And through Hive’s tight integrations with Microsoft, Hive has become the company that Microsoft customers turn to when they need some additional horsepower from analytics and/or delivery perspective.

There’s a common misconception that Hive Streaming is just an eCDN partner of Microsoft. But just like Microsoft – we evolve too.

One of the things we’ve noticed over the years is that Hive Streaming’s analytics can provide substantial value for customers regardless of whether or not they need an eCDN.

The remainder of this blog post will focus on Hive Streaming’s stand-alone analytics capabilities for Microsoft Teams Live Events, but if you desire both and want more details on the Hive eCDN, please go here.

With Hive Analytics, you can get analytics and reporting for Live Events run in Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or Stream.

At a high level, Hive Streaming analytics can be very easily enabled for your Microsoft Teams Live Events and immediately start to provide you with an understanding of metrics such as:

  • How are your employees (both remote and office workers) engaging with your broadcasts?
  • Are employees actually watching your videos?
  • What’s the quality of experience?
  • Did your employees tune in live or did they watch on-demand?

All great information to have to improve your internal video communication strategy and boost employee engagement.

image of video event

A sneak peek of Hive Analytics – analytics and reporting tool for Microsoft Teams Live Events

Hive Analytics is divided into 2 parts, and these are 1) Hive Insights and 2) Hive Vi.

Let’s kick off with Hive Insights:

This module provides detailed information about an individual Microsoft Live Event and its replays as a VOD asset.

On the top bar, you see a snapshot of what happened during the event. You can see things such as:

  • Average viewing time
  • Number of unique viewers
  • How many tuned in live
  • Number of VOD viewers
  • Bandwidth saving (if you used an eCDN)
  • The overall quality of experience
Microsoft teams analytics_overview_1

Further down, you can see the interactivity of the module.

Just hover over the different bars to get actionable information from the event.

microsoft teams analytics_viewers insights_2

In the map view – you can see where people are viewing from. You can drill down to a specific country, state, city, and even offices to see where your employees are consuming the content from.

microsoft teams analytics_geographical overview_3

Connected to quality of experience – you can also use the maps function to see where viewers were more engaged during the live event, potentially because the video quality was better.

You could use that information to determine if you might be having a network challenge or bandwidth issues in a specific location that are preventing employees to take part in your messaging.

Microsoft teamsanalytics_geographical distribution_4
Now let’s take a deep dive into the filtering features.

Insights allow you to really detect and understand trends within your individual network or your individual event.

And by seeing these trends – you can create actionable information to sharpen your upcoming video events.

You can look at it from a network perspective, meaning do you consistently see network challenges in one specific location for example. Then you might need to look at upgrading your network in that specific location.

And from an engagement perspective, are people in another specific location less engaged in your video – if so why could that be?

microsoft teams analytics_trends_5

If you scroll down in the filtering field – you see some more of the viewer metrics.

The player visibility indicates whether the video player was in the forefront – or if the viewer had it hidden behind other windows or minimized.

That way you know if your employees were actually watching and paying attention as they consumed the content.

And guess what – you can drill down to individual viewers and see when did they switch from full screen to a background tab?

And that is some valuable information you can use to both troubleshoot and to detect engagement.

microsoft teams analytics_viewers and time_6

Hive VI

This module in Hive Analytics takes information collected from individual events, compiles that information together – and allows you to visualize trends over time.

VI provides you a lot of information that you can interact with. In the usage overview, you can for example analyze performance based on:

  • time scale
  • amount of viewers
  • used video platforms
microsoft teams analytics_hive vi_overview

Some other data you can look at is last month’s videos and how these videos were consumed, as well as how well they performed.

microsoft teams analytics_hive vi_last month

Scrolling down to Viewer Metric – this is a great feature to understand employee behavior as well as corporate culture.

In this example, we see that the day that most employees consumed the event was on a Friday. Maybe that’s relevant for corporate policy in that Fridays is your day to catch up internally.

microsoft teams analytics_hive vi_viewer metric

In Viewer Geography, you get an understanding of where most of your viewers are located. By country, by region, by city – even by office site

microsoft teams analytics_hive vi_viewer geography

And finally – the Quality of Experience map. What this does is that it’s able to tell you on a location basis – what areas might be having recurring challenges on the quality side.

Maybe that’s due to network connectivity, or employees having old computers. This may explain why a certain location is having lower engagement – simply because there are technical challenges that are outside of their control.

microsoft teams analytics_hive vi_viewer qa
Yellow Triangle

Enterprise communication is evolving. Stay informed to stay on top.

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