Top 11 Video Marketing Metrics Brands Need to Track

So, you’ve decided to add some video content into your marketing mix.

But how can you tell if it’s helping you achieve your business goals?

Video marketing, like most other forms of content marketing, is an expensive habit.

You need a special set of tools, a consistent stream of watch-worthy story ideas, a budget for production and editing, and time to dedicate toward strategizing, shooting, and promoting the video once it has been created.

After all of that investment, you would think it would be easy to figure out if your videos are having a positive impact on your marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

There are a lot of different metrics that are associated with video marketing and advertising, and only a handful of them are going to be worthwhile for your business.

Figuring out which ones align most closely with your ultimate goals and taking the time to analyze them is the key. That’s what we’re going to cover in this article.

Let’s get to it!

11 Video Marketing Metrics You Need to Know

Awareness and Reach Metrics

Sitting at the top of the funnel are your awareness and reach metrics. These are the KPIs that you want to measure if exposure is your main goal.

1. Views

Views are probably the most basic metric to measure when it comes to video.

Video views are a great indication that people are at the very least, interested in the idea that your video presents. On Facebook and Instagram, a video view is defined as a 3-second view or longer. On YouTube, a video view is counted after 30 seconds of watch time.

High view counts can act as a form of social proof, so if one of your goals is to build brand trust, you might want to optimize your promotional budget to generate more views.

But remember, views are a top of funnel metric – they don’t move the needle on revenue alone, so if you need your video program to impact your business further down the funnel, consider optimizing for a conversion metric (which we’ll get to in a minute) instead.

2. Shares

Another metric that helps to measure reach would be shares of your video. If you are hoping to generate a lot of shares with your video, you’ll need to keep this in mind during the production and creation process.

Marketing videos typically don’t “go viral” without some form of strategic planning on the backend.

However, if you do produce a video with the hopes of reaching a broad audience, you can bet that people sharing it will play a role in helping you achieve success.

If you are having trouble generating shares from your audience, you can always dedicate a few seconds of your videos asking your viewers to share it.

3. Impressions

Impressions are a great metric for understanding how many eyeballs are actually on your content.

Impressions are the number of times your video was displayed, but there’s no information about whether someone actually watched it.

If your video has a small number of impressions, it’s likely that it wasn’t posted in a place where people can find it. If you have a lot of impressions, but very few video views, that is an indication that the content topic isn’t jiving with your audience.

4. Organic Rankings

The last reach metric we are going to cover is how well your video is ranking in search. Since YouTube is owned by Google and acts as its own form of search engine, it is important to think about how you can optimize your videos to be found easily when someone is searching for that topic.

The better your video ranks organically, the more people will see it.

If your video is not showing up when searched, consider updating the title, description, and other fields to contain your keywords so you can improve your reach.

Video Engagement Metrics

Also sitting near the top of the funnel are going to be your video engagement metrics.

These KPIs can help you understand whether your content is resonating with your audience and measure how many people go from being passively aware of your videos to actively involved in watching them.

5. Watch Time

Watch time is usually defined as the total number of minutes spent viewing your video.

While having a lot of views can feel great, the real measure of the worth of your content is in how long someone actually watched. If they stuck around long enough to get the value out of your video, you can count that as a win.

3-Second video views are great for building up a Facebook retargeting pixel, but not for generating passionate fans.

6. Percentage Watched

Along the same vein as watch time, the percentage of the video that they watched is also indicative of how interesting the content is. Not only does this metric help you understand how much of the video they consumed, it can also tell you whether or not your videos are the correct length.

If you always produce 5-minute long videos and people are consistently dropping off around the 1-minute mark, you may want to experiment with shorter videos, or take your concept back to the drawing board.

However, if your audience routinely makes it to the end of your 10-minute video show, congratulations! You’ve hit the nail on the head with content and length.

7. Likes (and Dislikes)

Typically, if someone likes your video and agrees with the points it is making, they will “like” it.

Videos with a lot of likes indicate to other people that the video is worth watching. Positive reactions are also a signal to the algorithm of the platform where the video (like Facebook, for instance) is hosted that it should be surfaced and shown to more people

Conversely, if a video has a high negative reaction metrics (for example, thumbs down on YouTube), this is a warning that people either don’t like the content, or disagree with the sentiments shared within the video. Keeping an eye on both positive and negative reactions will give you insight into what’s working and what’s not from a content perspective.

It is worth noting that negative reactions are still a form of engagement.

Whether or not it is worse to have tons of dislikes versus no engagement at all relies on your brand goals. There is an old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so if you’re hoping to strike a chord, negative reactions might be better aligned with your goals than no reactions at all.

8. Comments

Comments are another engagement metric that demonstrates your audience’s involvement in your video content. It takes a little more effort to post a comment or share a thought than to simply like (or dislike) something and move on to the next thing.

When your videos receive comments, this is a great opportunity for you to have public conversations with your audience, allowing you to foster community as well as humanize your brand.

Also, people who leave comments are highly engaged with what they are watching. Analyzing not just the number of comments, but also the people who are leaving them can give you a treasure trove of insight into who your most passionate fans are.

These are the people who you want to find more of with your marketing efforts.

Use this information to create a “brand ambassador” persona and figure out what it is about the content that they enjoy so you can continuously replicate success.

Conversion Metrics

All of the previous metrics we’ve covered have been associated with top and middle of funnel goals, but the metrics listed in this section are going to be the ones closer to the bottom.

Your conversion metrics are those that are the most important to measuring the effectiveness of your work.

9. CTA Conversion Rate

This metric measures the percentage of video viewers who take the desired action noted in your video.

Sometimes this may be called “Click-Through Rate,” but since they might take the action without actually clicking on anything, a better metric to measure would be the percentage of people who did what you asked them to do.

Obviously, it might be easier to just measure the number of clicks a CTA within a video receives, but not all calls to action will require clicking or even have the ability to do so from within the content, which is why we are discussing CTA conversion rate instead.

In order to measure this, you’ll need to make sure your videos have clearly defined calls to action.

If your goal is to send people to a specific product page, piece of content, or landing page, you can mention a custom tracking link within your video and see how much traffic you generate from the video.

If people click or type in the link and convert on your website, especially if they made a purchase, you can tie this action back to your video strategy with attributed revenue, which we’ll cover in more detail right now.

10. Website Traffic from Video Sources

As noted earlier, if one of your goals is to drive more traffic to your website, the best way to measure this is by keeping track of the sources of where your traffic is coming from.

Using UTM parameters in your video CTAs can give you detailed insight into which video people came from. You can then track their journey across your site, which allows you to see how people who come from video sources engage.

This information can help you decide which pages people prefer to visit, how effective your video CTAs are, and if there is any way to optimize their experience to take more of the desired actions you need to meet your overarching goals.

11. Conversions from Video Sources

The last conversion metric worth tracking is how many people are converting from those video sources.

If your call-to-action tells people to visit a piece of content on your website, and they subscribe to your blog while visiting, and then five weeks later make a purchase from an email campaign you sent, you can tie all of these touch-points back to video as the original source and assign a dollar amount to the channel.

Or if your video is a sales video, telling people to “buy now,” and you have a custom purchase code within the video, you can directly see how many people use the code in order to make a purchase.

When you can clearly see how much money you are making where video plays a part in the sales process, you can easily determine your ROI.

This can be harder to track when you are advertising your videos with the goals of generating brand awareness though.

In this case, tying impressions to brand lift and comparing to a control period might give you some insights into whether your awareness campaigns are helping to increase revenue.

Also, not all types of videos are going to play a large role in driving revenue, so if you are wondering why your videos aren’t impacting your sales numbers, it is likely because your content strategy was too top of funnel and doesn’t align with revenue as a goal.

When you determine your goals and map the strategy, you need to consider how you are going to generate sales from your videos instead of hoping that those entertaining viral videos might somehow turn into revenue for your company.

 How to Measure Video: Final Thoughts

As the graph below demonstrates, it’s not a lack of production resources or even a lack of compelling content that hold brands back from winning with video marketing.

Source

Having an effective strategy is the greatest challenge.

And you can’t have an effective strategy without understanding how your KPIs fit into the puzzle.

While metrics alone aren’t everything, they do help you understand what needs to be optimized and if a pivot is in order. 

When deciding which metrics to track for your video marketing efforts, remember that:

• You don't need to do video marketing just because everyone else is doing video marketing - you need to do video marketing when it helps you achieve your goals.
• You need to choose metrics that align with these goals.
• There are different metrics associated with different parts of the marketing funnel: top of funnel metrics will tell you about how many people are coming in contact with your videos, middle of funnel metrics help you understand your audience's interest in the content, and bottom of funnel metrics help you see whether they are taking the desired actions you want them to take.
• Videos are a large investment. If you have a smaller budget, stick with video content that help you achieve sales goals and reinvest in top of funnel video content once you have demonstrated success. 

Originally published on the Hearst Bay Area blog.