Video Metrics: Measuring What Matters.
Your video is up and running, you’re starting to rack up views. What’s next? How do you actually measure the success of your video project?
Before you start measuring your video’s success, you must define what success means to you and your business. Hopefully, you set up a goal for your video project when you were creating your content. And you kept that goal in mind as you came up with a distribution strategy. Now’s the time to see if it’s all working. The key is find the right metrics to measure success. Was your ultimate goal to increasing brand reach, engage with your viewers, drive traffic to your website?
Engagement can mean many different things. From social shares to comments to how long a viewer stays watching the video.
Watch time is a great way to measure your audience’s engagement. Ideally, your viewers will stay engaged throughout the entire length of your video. Most video platforms let you track your video’s watch time (the average amount of time viewers spend watching your video) or at least, whether or not viewers finished watching your video. YouTube and Facebook’s metrics go more in depth and let you see your viewers average engagement throughout the length of your videos with their Audience Retention metric. When looking at this metric you want to see a constant horizontal line from the beginning to the end of your video. If your purpose is to drive viewers to respond to a Call-to-Action (CTA) at the end of your video, then you need to make changes to ensure the viewer stays engaged until the end. This may mean revisiting your content, even, reconsidering the length of your video. The faster you can get to the point and deliver value to your viewer, the more likely your video is to succeed. Now, let’s talk about clicks.
Click Through Rates To make this a proper click-through discussion, your videos need to be clickable. If they are not, then there still needs to be some way to make sure your viewers followed your call to action. Perhaps you create a customized URL for each video or track in bit.ly.
Most likely, your video will have a Call-to-Action (CTA), whether that is a link to your website, a sign-up request, or an ad to buy a product or service – and if it doesn’t then it should. The Click-Through Rate is the percentage of viewers that clicked on a Call-to-Action in your video. This metric helps you keep track of the effectiveness of your CTA. If you’re getting views and viewers are staying engaged, but your video still is not driving action then you may need to tweak your Call-to-Action. Make sure you’re sharing video content with a clear and strong call-to-action that is valuable to your target audience.
Beyond the Click We’ve talked a lot of looking beyond the view in other words making sure you are tracking metrics that are more than just views. How about beyond the click? Essentially, the goal is to turn your leads into customers. Go a step further and see what actions viewers are taking after they watch your videos by using your website’s analytics tool. Are your videos driving traffic to your website? And is that leading to more sign-ups or more conversions? Video metrics are a powerful tool that can pinpoint areas where your video needs some sprucing up and whether or not the content is engaging for your target audience. Choose your metrics wisely and keep a clear goal in mind when analyzing the data. If your video is not performing the way you expected, using the right metrics will help you identify the problems and make the necessary tweaks to get your video back on the track to success. Yes. We have highly simplified this post in order to get you thinking about video differently. There are tons of other strategies to make sure your videos are indeed driving the results. Please feel free to ask us any questions you may have… happy to help!
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About the Author: Roshni Hannon Contact: roshni@madbearproductions.com Her name means “light” and that is what she is… high energy, bright and fast. And yes… she does run regularly. While we’re not sure what she is running from (perhaps her two young kids) we know she’s covered a ton of ground. She was the Executive Producer for an award winning and number one rated morning show in Tampa for years. And now, she uses her unique blend of organization, storytelling and curiosity to help Mad Bear clients find their stories. Think of her as an architect, a story architect.
