Conventionally, there are few video metrics more important to keep an eye on than the number of views a video gets. Knowing how different platforms measure ‘views,’ it should be apparent that that’s not the most reliable way to measure the relative success of a video campaign.
With all the different metrics available, it can be difficult to narrow down on a few touchpoints that are more important than others in order to tell what’s working.
The more proper way of generating an understanding of how effective a video campaign is would be to take note of Key Performance Indicators to keep track of the video ROI. With the kinds of efforts analytics companies are putting on big data, sharing information across data warehouses and platforms is easier than ever.
Here are the most important KPIs you need to take note of.
1. Watch Time
Total watch time is the cumulative amount of time that’s spent by viewers watching your videos. It is one of the important metrics that come into play when measuring how engaging your video is. Generally speaking, the more watch time a video has, the more engaging the content is.
Factors such as the length of the video and the format it is presented in play a crucial role in how much watch time a video enjoys.
Watch time can also be applied to individual videos and be used much the same way it is applied for cumulative videos. It ultimately reflects the level of satisfaction viewers have for your videos. This enables you to keep track of trends and outliers, including which kind of content they enjoy the most.
2. Average Completion Rate
The average completion rate of a video is a measure of the percentage of your video that viewers watch. For example, if you have a 70% completion rate, most viewers watch at least 70% of the video every single time. It’s an important metric because it helps you know how capable a video is of holding attention.
It is also an important metric to want to bump up since it plays a crucial role when it comes to calculating how engaging your video is. When used together with the average view duration, you can figure out where most users stop watching the video and start making the changes from there. A little bit of experimentation is always encouraged.
3. Average View Duration
The average view duration is the amount of time every viewer spends watching a single video, on average. It’s calculated by dividing total watch time by the total number of plays the video has had, including replays.
This metric should play a crucial role in your analytics data because it’s an indicator of the optimal length your videos should have. For instance, should your minute-long videos get a continual average view duration of 30 seconds, you might want to slash those videos in half.
It also allows you to track at which point most of your users drop off, if any. Be careful to be on the lookout for spurious correlations, though. If the data is difficult to interpret, do some A/B testing just to be sure.
4. Click-Through-Rate
Click-Through-Rate is another one of those metrics that’s calculated very differently depending on the social media platform. The gist of it is that CTR measures the ability of your video to encourage viewers to take certain actions. Luckily for you, video format has the highest CTR of them all, at 1.84%. Since users have becomes desensitized to ad placement over time, a good CTR should be anything above 0.2%.
A low CTR should encourage you to place your CTA closer to the start of the video since most people don’t finish watching videos, to begin with. This metric should typically be used in conjunction with the average view duration and completion rate.
Click-through-rate can usually be increased by A/B testing a number of variables. For instance, changing the thumbnail is a reliable way to ensure viewers click more on your video, and a good test to see if that metric has significant weight.
Again, this will depend on the platform you are relying on. Making your video more engaging will also incite viewers to watch more of the video and probably reach the CTA.
5. Engagement
We finally reach one of the magic words of internet marketing – engagement. Engagement is essentially a measure of how well a video is received by your target audience. It is measured based on the kinds of reactions your video gets – likes, shares and comments have the most weight when calculating this metric.
The reason engagement is considered the unicorn of video marketing is that everyone uses it to boost how easy your video is to find. The more engaging it is, the more people are going to watch it.
Not only that, engagement works as a sort of feedback collection tool, too. Whether the video is more liked or disliked, and the general kinds of comments the video receives, can all tell you how people feel about your video. You may have covered a controversial topic without even knowing it. This enables you to change things up the next time around so you’re not a sitting duck.
The final and most often reliable form of video engagement is social shares. According to Facebook, nearly 48% of all views and watch time can be traced back to social shares. These paint a clear picture of how loyal your audience is to the brand and how easily it catches on with new people.
If it’s shared more, it means your audience is confident enough about your brand to be able to show it to their friends and family. Considering how important word-of-mouth recommendations are in the marketing world, the credibility boost you get from a single share is immense. It can then be taken to mean that anyone who shares the video is willing to identify themselves with your brand.
