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Millions of people actively use video as an integral part of their marketing efforts. Consumers who don’t see clear, relevant video content spend more time viewing things like YouTube and Facebook than they do reading print.

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If you’re relying on video to drive awareness and sales, you need to know the optimal length for your videos.

Consumers aren’t very selective with their attention spans these days. Even when they’re searching on Google, nearly two-thirds (63%) say they’ll look at an ad for four seconds, and half (49%) say they’ll look at one for six seconds or less. But long-form videos don’t do a great job of making that compelling connection.

As a result, short-form video is better than nothing. In fact, according to a recent poll commissioned by Nielsen, roughly half of all viewers, or 53%, would spend more time viewing a video that contained six or more minutes of content than one that contained less than five minutes. You need compelling content — but in what format?

To help you answer that question, let’s consider the optimal length for videos.

More On This… Should you schedule video for certain dates or times?

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According to Nielsen, people tend to watch between five and six minutes of video in an average viewing session, though sometimes a full-length commercial can get the viewer to stick around for a while.

Here are three formulas we can use to define the optimal length:

5-Minute Videos = 3,230 Seconds (average consumption time)

15-Minute Videos = 2,780 Seconds (average consumption time)

30-Minute Videos = 1,310 Seconds (average consumption time)

After breaking down the average amount of time that different types of video take to consume, these are the optimal segments:

5-Minute Videos = 1,008 Seconds

15-Minute Videos = 615 Seconds

30-Minute Videos = 1,085 Seconds

This format depends on which content categories you’re writing about.

Live content tends to last longer than static content, while web content is typically short enough that an hour’s worth of it isn’t a huge amount of time.

Now for our devilish trick: Add music. After analyzing 1,655 hours of ad content, Nielsen found that when a music track was used in a mobile video, it greatly increased the time people watched it.

Nielsen compiled some of the most popular music genres from the top five most popular music sites:

41137 (a global digital music site)

Beats Music (a music streaming service)

Pandora (an online radio service)

YouTube (a YouTube subscription service)

Adblock Plus

Other Musicians (a mobile social networking site)

Audiences who use some or all of the above services were 3.5 times more likely to watch a music video than those who don’t use them, and in particular, they were eight times more likely to watch an advertising video when the music track was included.

The bottom line is that music is great for video, and it can get people to stick around longer. It also lowers the barrier of entry to watching a short video, and it helps optimize the frequency of the content you show viewers.

Plus, marketers like it because music helps introduce an experience. Take Beats Music, for example. It plays music videos, originals, music scores, and a broad selection of playlists. Plus, it recently became the first digital music service to launch in new BMW models.

By offering it on BMW cars, the automaker is able to target exactly the same music to its audience.

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