5 Video Marketing Metrics to Help You Measure Success

When producing your videos, do you set clear goals?

By having specific goals when creating videos, you will have a defined purpose for every piece of content that you make. This will also make it easier to measure the success of each video.

There will be a lot of overlapping goals in every video you post, but you also need to define what you want to achieve for each one of them.

Your videos will aim to achieve one, two, or three of the common goals of video marketing: brand awareness, sales, and consumer education. But for every piece of content you post, you need to have a clearer purpose.

How can you do this? You can assign different metrics with varying degrees of importance for each video.

Let’s take a look at five basic metrics you can measure in your videos.

Views

Right off the bat, counting views is the first step to knowing the reach your video has. It’s the easiest metric that you can track in every video you post. But how telling are they exactly?

Tracking views offer no other insight than how many people actually watched your video. That’s about it. You’ll know that this is the number of people that clicked play on your post, but not whether they stuck around and watched it until the end.

Views will help you get a grasp of how you are able to get audiences to play your video. But to help you understand what it means, you’ll need context. That’s where the other metrics come in.

Play rate

How is the play rate different from views? Simply put, play rate differentiates unique audiences from returning viewers.

What other insights can this metric provide? It will also help you take note of the effects of certain elements of your video, like the title, thumbnail, and its placement on your webpage.

The play rate is just another way of measuring your video’s reach. However, it also helps you determine whether your video holds any retention at all.

Watch time

If you want a more valuable insight into your audience’s viewing behavior, the watch time can indicate that. It will show you how audience consumes your posts.

The watch time will indicate just how long your viewers actually watch your video. This can show you just how “watchable” your content is. It will also help you determine the points at which your audience loses interest in your video, so you will know how to improve.

Most importantly, the watch time will show you whether your audience reaches your call to action or not, which also depends on the point at which you included it in your video. If they make it to that point, it will also be indicative of how effective your call to action is.

Shares

If you want to start tracking engagement, you can first take a look at the number of shares your videos get. You will see how your viewers were compelled to act after watching your video.

There are other factors that need to be considered when tracking shares. You might have done some advertising to promote your video. You should take that into account when determining how well your videos performed, and how effective your advertising is.

More shares don’t necessarily mean a more successful video. Sometimes, it’s more indicative of how well your promotion did, so you need to consider that when measuring this metric.

Comments

The metric that can best provide an insight into your audience’s response to your video is the comments you receive. This time, qualitative data is provided, so you can gauge the sentiment of consumers regarding your content.

Do you want to understand how consumers received your content? Consolidate their comments. Their feedback can range from very positive to downright mean, so be ready for that. It will give you a sense of the general sentiment of your audience.

Keep in mind that only a handful of your audience will leave comments, so it’s still just a small segment of your viewers. Most people are not likely to provide feedback, and they might hold entirely different opinions as well.

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