Data makes the world go round, they say. The modern world, more so the marketing world, is driven by the kinds of data we can collect. However, most people will either blindly follow trends and end up with metrics that aren’t of much use or completely (perhaps unknowingly) ignore all the data that is useful.
The only way of continuing the turning of the wheels of good video marketing is by knowing what kinds of data benefit your business and how to put that data to work for you. So, what metrics do you need to track to keep you on your toes?
View count is one of the most misunderstood, and, in some ways, most overestimated metric in video analysis and the marketing world in general. It’s a simple metric – it shows how many eyes have fallen on your content – but the nature of its simplicity is a two-edged sword. Whereas it has its uses, it can be incredibly deceptive.
First off, most platforms count a view as three seconds or more of viewing, aside from YouTube which registers thirty seconds first. According to research carried out by Facebook and Nielsen 1, up to 47% of the value of your video campaign comes from the first three seconds. More views do indicate that your video has reached a broader audience, but it doesn’t necessarily mean more conversions.
Views are useful for tracking how popular your videos have become. If the goal of your campaign is to create brand awareness, it’s an incredibly metric for you. However, if your primary focus is to generate more conversions, you have the right mindset but need to dig a little deeper to get to the gold.
Social sharing indicates the number of people that have shared your video with their friends, generally via a widget on your website. By itself, the widget may not mean much, since the real action happens on whichever third-party site your video ends up in.
Social sharing is one of the main 2 ways of driving discoverability of your site, right up there with search engine optimization. It’s a measure of both how appealing your video is to potential customers and how willing people are to talk about it.
Just like with viewership, this is an excellent way of promoting brand awareness and improving brand interaction since it helps you tap into a greater part of your target audience.
Once your video lands on another site, it helps to study how people interact with it and the kind of (useful) feedback you garner from your viewers. Don’t just keep note of the number of likes/retweets/shares, keep in mind the positive and negative things people say about it.
When it comes to metrics, engagement is touted to be the most useful of them. It’s a measure of how much of your video was watched or otherwise interacted with. In general, it’s considered the most actionable of all metrics because it serves as a great indicator of quality and relevance rather than viewership bias as with total view count.
There are primarily three metrics used by large enterprises like Facebook to measure video engagement: the total number of minutes viewed, views and the number of people that watched for 10+ seconds.
This is usually expressed as a percentage, and the method of calculation will vary depending on your preferred platform. For the most part, however, sites like Cincopa provide this information on their dashboard, so you shouldn’t worry too much about the math behind it.
At the end of the day, you want people to watch as much of the video as possible, and even re-watch it to give you an edge. Better engagement means you are doing a great percentage of everything that needs to be done right.
A video’s play rate refers to the number of people that watch your video versus the number that saw the video (the number of impressions,) at least according to Google. According to a hosting site like Cincopa, it refers to the number of people that began to watch a video embedded on your site.
Regardless, play rate is a pretty useful metric for measuring the relevance of your video, especially in relation to where on the page it’s placed. The higher the play rate, the more enticing it is to visitors. If the focus of your campaign is to increase the percentage of your audience that clicks on your videos, this is a metric you should keep an eye out for.
Various things affect play rate: the thumbnail you choose, the title of your video, the location of the video on the page…etc. In general, the overall attractiveness of the video is going to have a huge impact on the play rate of your video.
Finally, we come to one of the most crucial metrics any marketer will ever have in their books. Most businesspeople refer to conversion rate as the number of people that have turned into paying customers from being casual viewers. This definition could be different depending on your specific business. B2B and B2C business models, for instance, have different definitions of the term.
Common ways of measuring conversions include counting the number of people that filled a form on your site, made a purchase or subscribe to your blog/newsletter. Your conversion rate can be measured and expressed as the number of viewers versus the number of converts (buyers/subscribers, etc.) as a percentage.
Despite all the novelty around the term, this metric is a lot tougher to track than most other metrics. Cincopa provides a great way of viewing your conversion rates, for instance. YouTube also does a pretty decent job at it, albeit you must hook in your Google Analytics account to get all the data you want. You will probably also want to track some data before the conversion (or lack of it) happens to help you better understand why it did (or didn’t) fall through.
Author Bio: Smridhi Malhotra – Having more than 8 years of writing experience, Smridhi Malhotra is a professional tech, health and travel blogger. She loves to gather and share her profound knowledge about the latest developments in technology. Smridhi is a management graduate and visual graphics artist and is currently pursuing masters in behavioral psychology. Her hobbies are practicing mindfulness, counseling children and traveling (a special love for Africa).
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