Video marketing can prove immensely profitable to your business in terms of garnering new sales, leads, customers, and revenue. Video is the most powerful content medium by far, with the potential to engage audiences in a way that text and images simply can’t compete with.
However, content generation is only half the job when it comes to video marketing. Measuring performance metrics is crucial to success, as with any advertising or marketing exercise. These metrics tell you how effectively your videos have achieved your goals, and where it’s best to invest in future marketing efforts. They can also point out the gaps in your video marketing campaign and help you address them.
The context is important, of course. Depending on the platform and the usage, video metrics can differ both in terms of which KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you use as well as how they are measured.
Here’s a rundown of which metrics best measure video advertising performance.
1. Views
View count is perhaps the most obvious KPI. It indicates the number of people who have watched your video and, therefore, its reach. Incidentally, you can also gauge reach by checking all the URLs where your video has been embedded. On YouTube, you can access this via the InLinks tab.
A view is measured differently across platforms:
- YouTube: A view is an instance of someone watching your video for 30 seconds
- Instagram: A view is an instance of someone watching your video for three seconds, or for one second if it’s a live video
- Facebook: Someone watches your video for three seconds, live or otherwise
- TikTok: As soon as someone starts watching a video in their feed
- LinkedIn: Someone views your video for two seconds with at least half of the video player visible on the screen
- X (formerly Twitter): Same as LinkedIn
2. Play Rate
Play rate is a crucial statistic that tells you how often someone has clicked on your video to play it. On social media platforms, videos are often set to auto-play in your feed and you don’t have to interact with your screen to watch it. However, on web pages, you usually need to click on an embedded video to play it.
This makes it a vital video advertising metric that gives you an idea of the engagement on our landing pages. Generally speaking, videos perform very well on landing pages and a poor play count can indicate user experience issues or simply uninterested prospects stemming from a poorly targeted campaign.
You can calculate play rate by dividing the number of people who have clicked a video by the number of visitors to that page. To improve your play rate, consider tactics such as experimenting with the thumbnail of the video to make it more eye-catching, the location of the video on the page, and the keyword or campaign targeting for that page.
3. Engagement
Engagement is a catch-all kind of video marketing and advertising metric that describes the ways viewers interact with your video. This includes likes, comments, and shares for your video on social platforms or via social and other platforms if it’s an embedded video.
The higher the engagement, the more popular that video is. It’s a good idea to track the platforms it’s being shared on to see where you’re getting more traction. Also, pay attention to any comments on your video as an advertising metric; consider it qualitative feedback to improve future video campaigns.
4. Clicks and Click-Through Rates
Clicks are among the most important metrics for a video advertising campaign. They’re the best indicator of how engaging that ad spot is. This goes for video ads on YouTube, Facebook, or any other ad network.
Typically, when viewers click on your ad, they’re directed to a landing page where they can either make a purchase or learn more about your product, service, or concept. It’s a good idea to A/B test different calls-to-action (CTAs) to see which one works best. You can obtain your click-through rate by dividing the number of clicks by the number of views for your ad.
5. Conversions
Ultimately all video advertising efforts are geared towards improving this metric. Conversions indicate the number of people who watch a video or video ad and become a customer or a lead as a result.
With the latter, tracking conversions is easy via the ads dashboard. Learning the number of conversions resulting from organic video views will require you to use tracking and UTM tags. You can implement site tracking by altering the CTA link, which will allow you to see how many visitors to a landing page arrived after watching a video. The number of conversions is the most straightforward video advertising metric to gauge a campaign’s effect on your bottom line.
Partner With 336 Productions for Superior Video Marketing ROI
336 Productions is a multiple award-winning production studio that specializes in business video marketing. We create high-quality video assets that are guaranteed to generate engagement and conversions for your business. As a full-service studio, we can assist you with end-to-end production of a wide variety of video types, including social media videos, product demos, ad spots, educational videos, brand videos, and more.
Check out our work or reach out to us for a consultation. Follow our blog to learn more about video marketing and advertising metrics.
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