how to measure the success of your videos.

Over the past few months we’ve taken the time to look into best practices for creating videos that represent your brand in the way you want. But corporate videos serve a very distinct purpose - often related to driving either new business enquiries or to increase business retention rates. So what is a pretty video without results?

Well first you need to have something to measure. It’s incredibly hard to understand if a video marketing project has been successful if you don’t have any concrete data on which to base your understanding. But more than that, it’s also important to understand what good results look like for you. Your video might have a huge view count, which seems like a success, but if the goal is to drive conversions then you’re measuring the wrong type of success.

With that being said let’s look into a number of measurables you can use to identify if your current video marketing efforts are proving successful.

This is the easiest metric to measure as every video platform provides you with data on the number of times your video has been played. However this is often the one that is most misleading. That’s because different platforms count plays differently. For example on Facebook your video only needs to have been watched for 3 seconds to count as having been ‘viewed’, whereas on YouTube it needs to have been watched for 30 seconds.

If the goal of your video is to generate brand awareness and expand the reach of your company then view count is something you’ll want to track, but make sure you take the time to understand what that view count means across platforms. For example 100 views of your video on Facebook is worth only 10 views on YouTube.

This is a really useful statistic which helps you to properly understand how effective your video is. Engagement percentage shows how much of your video a given user watched. So for example 50% means they only watched half of your video. Whilst that piece of information about an individual user is useful, where it really becomes useful is when you look into average engagement percentage and express this in a video engagement graph.

A  video engagement graph shows the average user engagement percentage throughout the length of your video. So in the example shown here you can see how the percentage begins at 100% (everyone has to watch at least one second for it to be tracked) and then slowly drops off throughout the video, with noticeable drops in the first 30 seconds and the last 10 seconds.

In this example we can interpret this data to see that the vast majority of viewers who are initially engaged by the video, remain engaged for the duration of the video. However, if we imagine that there is a call to action at the end of this example video, then despite statistics of 291 views and an average engagement percentage of 86%, only 53% (or approximately 154 visitors) actually stuck around to see the call to action. If the real measure of the success of your video is related to enquiries generated then understanding that only 50% of viewers are seeing your call to action is incredibly useful in judging if your video needs a bit of a re-think.

This is the stat that really counts, it’s the number of leads or actual customers generated as a result of your video marketing efforts. However, this is also the trickiest metric to track. If you have multiple videos across your marketing portfolio then it can be easier to look at total conversions as a percentage of total views. If you’re looking to get a more detailed understanding of how each of those videos is performing then it’s worth investing some time in Google Analytics to get an understanding of which videos are leading to conversions.

One more thing to consider is how will you attribute conversion success to a factor such as video? Depending on the product or service it’s not uncommon for a customer to have had multiple interactions with your business, such as phone calls, face to face meetings etc. before committing. So it can sometimes be hard to say how much of a role one single factor had. If viewing one of your videos was the first point of contact with someone who eventually became a customer then it’s fair to say that video played a pretty integral role in generating new business for you.

I hope that this little mini series on understanding how to measure the success of your video content has provided useful insights which allow you to focus your marketing efforts better and understand when they are working and when they aren’t.

If you want to discuss any of these points further or learn more, feel free to get in touch.