8 Video marketing metrics you can’t afford to ignore

What are video marketing metrics?

Video marketing metrics are different pieces of data that indicate the performance of your video marketing content. How well is it performing? What keeps your audience's attention? What bores them? Metrics provide the answers to all of these concerns.

There's a multitude of reasons why you would track your video metrics in video marketing — from improving your campaign in the middle of its run in order to send a message, to converting leads more successfully. It all depends on what the end goal of your campaign is.

But why do you even need to consider video marketing metrics?

Tracking video marketing metrics: Why does it matter?

You might be thinking: Do I actually need to understand those numbers at all? I know they’re important, but what exactly are they bringing to my business? What if they’re not useful?

These are completely valid questions, and there are quite a few possible answers. If your business relies on video content as one of its main marketing tools, “metrics are everything” is NOT an understatement in the slightest.

If you pick and analyze relevant metrics, they can help you understand the performance of video content and improve your business by being:

• A measure of success: different metrics can be proof of advancement or decline in your business — how many new customers you acquire, the rising or falling influence of your content, etc.
• Content optimization guides: by analyzing the right video metrics, you can optimize your future video content or remove/replace the video content that doesn’t communicate what you intended well enough.
• Conversion improvement devices: based on video engagement metrics, you can improve your conversion rates, and gain valuable insight into what your audience appreciates and reacts to the most.
• Audience insight indicators: you can gain a sense of how your audience responds to your videos, how they react to your content, their likes, dislikes, pain points, and needs.
• Trackers of accountability of a team or person: If you have specific people or teams producing particular videos or series of videos, you can track the performance of these videos and relate it to the people producing them. This way, you can deduce which people or teams meet the intention behind your videos the best.
  
  

The options are numerous, and every specific campaign might require a different set of metric targets to be fulfilled in order to be successful. Let's take a look at the video metrics you need to track to improve the success of your video content.

8 Most Important Video Metrics To Track

Regardless of what the primary goals of your video content are, there is a metric (sometimes called video content KPIs) that can provide insight into whether those goals are being fulfilled. Let's take a look at the most common ones.

While you read about them, try to think of ways these metrics can indicate where your business is headed, and if any of them can be helpful for you at this moment. Here's an overview of the top video metrics to measure.

View Count

Let’s start with the basics: the most obvious video metric and the most well-known one. The view count is a video metric to measure the reach of your video content — more accurately, how many people have clicked on it and watched for a set minimum amount of time (20s, 30s, or similar, depending on the platform).

You may be tempted to think that view count is just a vanity metric that doesn't provide any real insight into how your audience accepts your content. However, although basic, it is still a powerful indicator nonetheless, even today.

This metric is particularly useful for businesses that want to build brand awareness from scratch. Maybe you're just starting out, and high view counts can indicate credibility to new potential leads.

One thing to be noted is the views are counted differently between platforms. YouTube requires a video to be watched for 30 seconds in order for the interaction to be considered a view.

Another example is Facebook — which only needs 3 seconds to consider an interaction a view.

So, when analyzing data, research this rule for the specific platform(s) you post your video on and take this into account.

Of course, measuring video views is just the first step to measuring the success of your video, as well as the outreach, and effect of your video content.

It should also be noted that views are counted every time a person watches a video, even if they watch it from the same device — as long as they last longer than the minimum time required for a particular video platform to register them as views.

The view count is just the first step to analyzing your audience, but other metrics will provide a deeper understanding of how you are retaining their attention. Let's take a look at those.

Average Watch Time

The average watch time is exactly what you expect it to be — it's the average number of seconds, minutes (or hours!) people spend watching your videos.

When applied to multiple videos or a series of videos, you can gain insight into how interesting or relevant your content is to your audience.

This metric is effective when analyzing the development of your channel.

If this metric is on a constant rise from month to month, this is a clear indicator that your audience is more interested in each new video and that you're attracting more attention with each new piece of content. 

If this metric shows a steep decline, it's an obvious indicator that you're losing your audience's attention. 

You can use this metric to fine-tune or completely transform your video content or your video marketing strategy.

Average View Duration

Average video duration is simply the total watch time of your video divided by the total number of plays. This metric shows you how much time an average viewer spends watching your video (in minutes) before leaving.

So, if a video has a watch time of 100 minutes and has been viewed 500 times, the average person watched it for 5 minutes.

When you compare this metric to your video's length, you can reveal the length of videos your average viewer prefers.

For example, if you analyze a bunch of 5-minute videos and the average video duration is 2 minutes, you might want to consider shortening your content in the future — as it indicates that more than 50% of your video is irrelevant to your typical viewer.

To try and boost this metric you could:

• Create new, shorter videos
• Create shorter videos from existing content
• Analyze your audience and try creating content that resonates better with them
• Completely change the type of video content you create to create something unlike anything before

The right approach will vary for different cases. The best thing you could do in this case is either survey your audience or do tests and compare metrics between multiple videos to see which videos perform better. 

With enough examples, you will likely see a pattern — and that pattern is where your audience’s attention is.

Click-Through Rate

In video advertising, click-through rate or CTR refers to the percentage of people who actually click on your video compared to those who only see the thumbnail.

CTR can also represent the percentage of viewers who click video links compared to the total number of viewers who come across the link to the video.

For reference, a click-through rate of 2% to 10% is considered good for YouTube. A good TikTok CTR ranges from 1% to 3%, and similar is true for Facebook and Instagram.

Engagement Rate

The engagement rate refers to the number of likes, comments, and shares on a video or for multiple videos. Engagement rate metrics provide insight into how your audience responds to your content.

To calculate your engagement rate for all content: 

Add the total number of comments, likes shares (and any other types of engagement), divide it by the number of videos you want to analyze. Take the resulting number, divide it by the amount of views for selected videos, and then multiply that number by 100.

The same can be done for a single video, in which case you can skip the first “number of videos” division.

On its own, this number doesn't mean much. However, when compared between months, many argue that this metric is a very good indicator of whether your video content offers real value or not.

Furthermore, brands will use your engagement rate when deciding if they want to partner with content creators. Brands also often use engagement rates to determine the success of a campaign.

Different percentages of engagement rates are considered good across different platforms.

A good engagement rate is typically around 2% for YouTube. For TikTok, 2.65% is considered average. Of course, the higher the better.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is one of the most vital metrics out there for businesses.

In relation to video marketing, conversion rate indicates the number of leads or customers that you have gained because of your video or series of videos.

Depending on how you run your campaign, your clients may have filled in an online form, subscribed, or made a purchase — they became paying customers.

This number can be represented in percentage (the percent of viewers that have converted) or in number (the exact number of new paying customers).

Tracking this metric is somewhat of a challenge. It will probably include setting up a separate analytics tool like Google Analytics or Matomo.

Next, you will need to decide what viewers to include. How deeply do you analyze your customer's actions? Do you count it as a conversion if the last thing your customer did before converting was watch your video or are there other scenarios that are also applicable?

Basically, you need to determine and assign value to it so you can track your progress in this regard.

Audience Retention

Audience retention, or “viewer retention” is a graphic representation of your audience’s behavior throughout the video.  YouTube is an excellent example of just how valuable this metric can be. Let’s see how they do it.

There are 4 key moments in a YouTube video.

• Intro: This stat tells you what percentage of users continued watching after the first 30 seconds.
• Top moment: this is the part of the video where no one clicks off.
• Spike: This is a moment in your video that is the most re-watched or when people click share most frequently.
• Dip: This is a moment in your video that was frequently skipped or during which many viewers stopped watching.

Audience retention is the one metric that will precisely demonstrate the real value of your video to your audience, from second to second.

Regardless of the engagement, number of likes, and dislikes — if you're trying to reach people on a profound level and remain in the minds of your viewers, this metric is one of the most honest and precise indicators of whether you're succeeding in that regard. 

Subscriber Growth Or Follower Growth

Simply, the number of new subscribers or followers on various communication channels for a given time period.

This metric is a potential indicator of a video channel's success in attracting a new, interested audience that can potentially be converted into paying customers. The subscriber growth rate also provides insights into customer and product satisfaction and indicates future potential.

However, one big caveat here is that businesses must focus on attracting real, dedicated subscribers who are eager to return to your videos and recommend your business.

Tactics like subscriber buying are useless in the long term, as they just skew your picture of the real number of people who actually care about your business.

On the other hand, organic subscriber growth or follower growth means that your videos are attracting new audiences who are interested in seeing more and returning to a particular communication channel — and that your video content is successful in leaving a mark.

How Can You Improve Your Video Marketing Metrics?

A one-size-fits-all solution isn't really possible when trying to boost your video marketing metrics — because different actions will result in an increase of different metrics.

Many video marketing metrics are in contrast to one another, so you will need to choose the ones most relevant for your campaign.

You can improve your video marketing metrics by applying the following steps:

• Don’t focus on vanity metrics (the ones that don’t matter to your campaign goals)
• Identify the best metrics to track for your campaign goals
• Sort the metrics by priority from most to least relevant and pick the ones to improve
• Develop a step-by-step plan to boost the most important metrics in your following videos (or edit existing ones)
• Track data in a given time period and compare the before and after

This is the most specific advice we can give before getting too specific. To make the process a bit easier for you, we’ve prepared a list of questions you can ask so you can identify your relevant metrics:

• What type of content am I creating?
• Is it trying to solve a problem or ask questions?
• Is it supposed to be short and snappy, provoking or neutral?
• Is my content supposed to spark interaction or sell a product or service?
• Is it supposed to tell a story or be intriguing? Maybe both?
• Is it supposed to leave an audience wanting more or provide a concrete solution?

Answering at least some of these questions will get you a long way. Depending on your answers, you may need to revise your content strategy to try and boost different metrics — and it's up to you to decide what they are.

One of the best ways to track performance is by comparing various strategies and video variations against each other. A/B testing is a proven way to focus your future campaigns to achieve relevant goals, whether it’s increasing your conversion rates, watch time, view duration, or any other applicable metric.

By creating multiple video variations and comparing them through A/B tests, you can get to the bottom of exactly what pushes all the right buttons for your audience. Sometimes even subtle variations and changes can make a huge impact and get you to your results.

Plainly is a batch-rendering video automation solution designed for automatic generation and distribution of videos on a large scale. With Plainly, you can create multiple video versions or personalized video campaigns in record time.

Check out our success stories for examples of how our clients utilized the power of hundreds (and even thousands!) of video variations for their campaigns.

Things To Remember About When Analyzing Video Marketing Metrics

The key points you should remember regarding video marketing metrics are:

• Analyze your content (existing or future)
• Analyze what your audience expects and/or needs
• Describe your audience in precise terms and see if your content is suitable for their needs
• Use video marketing metrics and develop strategies to boost the most important ones
• Time your video just right
• Don’t be afraid to start over

Constant refinement and merciless content optimization are the only ways you can reach your audience and keep them loyal. If necessary, you need to be ready to remove old content without hesitation, if it contradicts your new, improved strategies.

Each audience is different and there’s no way of predicting precisely how it will react to your future content. That’s, at least in part, what makes it exciting.

Despite this unpredictability, understanding video metrics in the context of your audience is one of the best ways to get closer to the exact type of impression you want to make.

Finally — test, test, test. The more videos you create, the better you are going to be at getting everything just right. Focus your video marketing efforts on comparing your videos, analyze their pros and cons in the context of your desired metrics and your business goals, and create many video variations with subtle differences to improve your skills to perfection.

If you want to test your video content and produce many variations at scale, you can book a 30-minute demo with us today to get started with fresh video content today.