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How to add a Sentiment widget to videos

This article was translated using AI, which may cause inaccuracies or not directly reflect the product interface. If you continue to have issues, please contact Customer Support.

This feature is available on all paid plans (Self Serve and Enterprise).

The Sentiment widget lets you capture viewer reactions inside the video itself. Viewers respond with one click — no forms, no redirects — and you get aggregated feedback alongside the rest of your video analytics.

Sentiment is ideal for training, customer education, support, and internal-comms videos where you want to measure whether content is useful or engaging without sending viewers to an external survey.

⚠️Note: You can add one Sentiment widget per video. The two variants — thumbs up/down and 1–5 star rating — are mutually exclusive on a given video. Each viewer can respond once per session.

In this article:

About the Sentiment widget

Sentiment is an interactive component that renders inside the player at a timestamp you choose. Viewers see a short prompt and either thumbs up/down buttons or a 1–5 star scale. After they respond, voting is disabled for that session and their reaction is added to the aggregate.

How to add a Sentiment widget to a video

  1. Open your video from your Library.
  2. In the left panel of the managed video page, select Interactivity.
  3. In the Interactivity panel, choose Sentiment (alongside Cards, End screens, and other components).
  4. Pick a variant — Thumbs up/down or 1–5 star rating.
  5. Set the timestamp at which you want the widget to appear during playback.
  6. Enter a button label (up to 42 characters).
  7. Select Save.

Choosing a variant: thumbs up/down or star rating

  • Thumbs up/down — binary feedback. Best when you want a quick sense of whether the content landed.
  • 1–5 star rating — graded feedback. Best when you want to measure degree of usefulness or quality.

You can only use one variant per video. To switch, edit the existing widget rather than adding a second one.

Customizing the button label

The button label is the short prompt shown to viewers (for example, "Was this helpful?" or "Rate this lesson"). Labels can be up to 42 characters.

The viewer experience

At the configured timestamp, the widget appears in the player. The viewer clicks once — thumbs up/down, or a star — and their response is recorded. The UI then disables further voting for that session, so each viewer counts once per play.

Editing or removing the widget on a published video

Sentiment widgets can be added, edited, or removed on already-published videos without affecting viewer access. Existing responses are preserved when you edit the widget; removing the widget stops collection but does not delete previously collected data from your analytics.

Adding a Sentiment widget to multiple videos at once

You can apply a Sentiment widget to several videos in one action:

  1. Go to your Library.
  2. Select the videos you want to update.
  3. Apply the Sentiment component from the bulk-actions menu.

The current limit is 50 videos per bulk action, consistent with other bulk actions in the Library. We expect to raise this limit in the coming months.

What happens when you replace the video file

Your Sentiment widget configuration is preserved when you replace the source video, including the variant, label, and trigger timestamp. The one exception: if the trigger timestamp is later than the new video's duration, the widget will not render. In that case, edit the widget and choose a timestamp that fits the new file.

Sentiment analytics

Single video: Open the video from your Library and select the Analytics panel on the left. The Sentiment section shows aggregate metrics for that video — for example, total responses, thumbs up rate, or average star rating, depending on the variant you chose.

Across videos: Sentiment data is also segmented and aggregated in the cross-video Analytics section, so you can compare performance across your library and identify which videos are landing best with your audience.

For broader context on the analytics panel, see About analytics on the Video page and the Analytics Glossary.

API support

The Sentiment component can be added, edited, or removed via the Vimeo API, and Sentiment analytics are exposed via the Analytics API. See the developer documentation on developer.vimeo.com for the relevant endpoints.