Video marketing helps marketers connect with audiences and realize their business goals. With mobile phones more in use than ever before, video is a major content format for smaller screens. To improve one’s video marketing, it’s vital to use video marketing metrics that show you how your marketing efforts are going. Let’s explore the key marketing metrics that matter and how they help.
1. Engagement Rate
This metric refers to how long a viewer stayed tuned to your video. It is measured as a percentage of the video watched. The average engagement of a video (i.e., how much of a specific video the total number of viewers watched on average) can indicate whether the video is interesting or not.
Depending on the platform you use, you’ll know at what time in the video engagement starts to drop off. This can help you to experiment and improve the quality and editing of your content or to create something entirely different.
2. Play Rate
Play rate is the percentage of page visitors who actually clicked play and began watching your video. This metric tells you several important things:
• How interesting your video looks.
• Whether it’s relevant to the keyword people used to find your video.
• If your video location (i.e., its placement on your site) is eye-catching.
If your play rate is low, it means that people are ignoring your content, and something isn’t working. Keep an eye on this metric, and make the following changes:
• Increase the size of your video so that people notice it on your website.
• Change the thumbnail to make it intriguing and relevant.
• Change the headlines, descriptions and other text around your video to draw attention to it.
• Move your video to a place where it makes sense. It may simply be located on a page where users have no use for it.
Boosting your play rate will help you communicate with your audience and drive them to take action, whether it’s to subscribe to your newsletter or buy a product.
3. View Count
View count is a basic but important metric to use. The total number of views your video has can indicate how popular or successful it is.
It has a psychological effect on your viewers, too. People often look at a video’s view count as evidence of how good a video is, and this can lead to more people watching your content. Make sure that you promote your video by sharing it on social media or by mentioning it in your email newsletter. Doing this will boost view counts, which could lead to higher content views.
4. Click-Through Rate
For businesses that create videos with the intent to drive conversions, the click-through rate (CTR) is a critical metric. It’s the percentage of clicks from the number of impressions a video has. If your video on YouTube appears in people’s feeds one hundred times and the video gets clicked on five times, then its CTR is 5%.
It’s another powerful way to tell if your customers like your content.
There’s another way that CTR can apply to video marketing. You can use this metric to track the rate at which people are clicking on your call to action (CTA). If you have clear goals where you’re trying to create more traffic on your site or get more sign-ups, the CTR for your CTAs will matter a great deal. It’s also a decent proxy for video conversion rates — a challenging metric to track.
Keep Your Video Marketing Campaigns On Track With The Right KPIs
The video metrics we looked at can give us a low- to medium-resolution picture (pun intended) of how well a video marketing campaign is going. There are other aspects, such as the device through which people are engaging with your content and whether they’re using social media, your website or some other platform. And how soon after they engage with your video do people “convert” and sign up with your brand or make a purchase? How memorable is your content, and what can you do to stay in your audience’s mind for longer?
These other details can help you improve your video marketing, but they can be challenging or even impossible to track. So, make sure to work with robust video platforms that have analytics features and generate reports that tell you what’s happening.
And today, with artificial intelligence (AI) being used more than ever in marketing, you can find AI-based tools to help you analyze your video marketing reach and personalize future content.
With the right video marketing key performance indicators (KPIs), you’ll be able to take advantage of the power of videos — perhaps the most engaging content format there is.
* This article was originally published here