Marketing is how companies drive sales, generate leads, and drum up brand awareness. Over 86% of businesses told Wyzowl that they use video marketing as part of their strategy.[1] That means only 14% of marketers haven’t heard the news. Video is the new king of marketing.
TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn all have a unique role to play in your video marketing strategy, as your target customers could be everywhere! In fact, if you’re a B2B brand, HubSpot reports show that LinkedIn is projected to take over as the most popular video channel for B2B marketers in 2022.
But just like every other form of marketing, it has to work. So how do you measure the success of your video marketing strategy? Let’s dive in!
What to Measure
Whatever goal you set out to achieve at the start of your campaign is the primary metric you should measure. If you’re looking to boost engagement, you’ll be looking at likes and comments. If you want more sales, you’ll be following the money. Or, if your goal was to increase conversions, you’ll want to measure click-through rates or CTR.
However, all metrics tell a story. Maybe your click-through rate wasn’t as high as you hoped, but your engagement went up. This is still a win. All of these metrics contribute to earned media or brand awareness.
Here are some specific goals and how to measure them.
View Count or Unique Viewers
This isn’t the final word on success, but it does speak to reach and performance. A big number for view count can prove your content is attractive and interesting.
Each platform shares view counts differently or even has a minimum of seconds required before a video can count as “viewed,” like YouTube’s 30-second rule. Facebook is a little more generous with only three seconds, but this can potentially skew your numbers.
Tips To Increase Views:
- Upload across multiple platforms
- Optimize the title and description with keywords
- Design custom thumbnail or cover photos
- Keep hashtags and captions or descriptions relevant
Play Rates, Watch Through Rates, and Abandon Rates
Play rates relate to how often a user watches your video or physically presses play to view instead of auto-play. For tutorials or particularly hilarious content, it could be several times per user.
Watch-through indicates how many viewers watch your videos through to the end. Similarly, abandon or drop-off rates show how many viewers start your video and then leave before it’s over.
Statistics from Vidyard show that the length of your video matters. Over two-thirds of viewers, 68% to be exact, will watch a video to the end if it’s less than 60 seconds. However, only a quarter of users will complete a video as long as 20 minutes.[3]
To determine your video’s play rate, divide the number of viewers by total impressions. A low view rate may indicate that your content isn’t engaging enough to capture their attention or your messaging in the description or caption is off.
You may not be reaching your target audience, or it may be boring outdated content. It could also mean that you’re simply posting to the wrong platform or need to redesign your thumbnail or cover photos.
These elements should help you build a foundation for measuring play rate and watch-through metrics. If you’re not able to improve play rates enough with small tweaks in design, captions, and targeting, you may have started on the wrong track with your content. Pivot and start over. This is figureoutable.
Conversions and Click-Through Rates
This is one of the most crucial elements of data for video marketing, especially if this is what drives another metric like leads. This is also how you know if your goal to drive sales and increase website traffic from your social media content and ads are working.
The click-through rate or conversion rates tell you who took action based on your content. How many clicked, rather than just passively consuming? If CTR is the desired metric, you need to leave the video up long enough to truly measure accurate results. A day or two probably isn’t enough unless you already have a huge following.
Like view counts, conversions and clicks are calculated differently by the various video platforms. YouTube calculates the number of clicks divided by how many overall impressions, and Google AdSense uses the same formula.
To calculate your conversion or click-through rate, you will divide the number of clicks by the number of total views. If you’re trying to collect leads or sales, use the same formula by dividing that number by the views.
Tips To Increase Conversions:
- Test, test, test
- Use video content for the optimal places in the sales funnel
- Enhance the landing page with additional video
- Depending on your platform, incorporate clickable CTAs
Testing and enhancing content for conversions never really ends. The key is knowing your target audience like the back of your hand. The more zeroed in on them you are, the easier optimization will be for your campaign.
Measuring Impressions and Reach
This is the best and easiest metric to track and is how you will prove video effectiveness for a campaign geared towards enhancing brand awareness. Impressions indicate how many times the platform displayed your content, even if no one clicked or watched to the end.
There’s no real formula needed to measure this. It’s all right there in the raw numbers. It’s important to note how impressions are different from reach.
Reach indicates how many unique viewers were fed your content. Impressions will increase if the same viewer sees your content, whereas reach will not.
Reach is the more powerful metric of this pair, but they can both tell the story of earned media and brand awareness.
When impressions are low, you may need to reevaluate your entire content plan. Review messaging, targeting, and keywords to continue optimizing for reach and impressions.
Sharing Is Caring
When calculating your sharing metrics, be sure to include how many times your video was shared on every social platform, not just one. Unless, of course, you’re only using one. But we already covered that! Be in all the places your customers are!
A video that’s great to watch isn’t necessarily the same quality as a video that’s great to share. Sharing is caring! Create your video content to be compelling enough for your audience to share with friends and family. This shows how invested you are in the client experience and that you can be relied on as a creative, reputable source.
When someone shares your content, this isn’t merely a vanity metric. It is a measurement of engagement and still works to boost brand awareness and credibility. The user is unafraid to associate with your brand and your products or messaging. And let’s not forget the more shares, the higher your chances for sales or conversions.
Tips To Boost Video Shares:
- Craft an engaging hook
- Check each platform’s optimal posting schedule
- Have a clear call to action for sharing
- Reshare previous content on your own profile
- Recruit your team to share videos
Creating content that’s infinitely shareable can take more planning and creative effort than your standard marketing fare. Test three to five different content topics in your niche and see which performs best. Make more like that one!
Comments
Comments are gold! This is proof of messaging and targeting. Comments also tell the fancy algorithms that you’re getting some attention, and they’re more likely to increase how far they push your content.
To measure your comment rate, divide the number of comments by how many views on each video. The comments section of any post is also where your target audience can speak directly to you without complicated chatbots and hold music. Keep an eye on what they have to say. Their feedback is invaluable!
Hear what your ideal customer has to say about your brand and product for free (no pricey surveys required), and put it into action. Let their desires drive future content production.
Likes and Reactions
There’s a reason content likes and reactions are last. These can be considered vanity metrics as they’re not indicative of targeting. For example, the world’s top celebrity influencer, the elite soccer tycoon Cristiano Ronaldo, gets millions of likes on his posts.
But those could be from soccer moms who think he’s handsome and not necessarily all from people who will buy his endorsed products. The same is true if you were to use puppies in your marketing. Everybody loves puppies! Even people who will never buy from you.
Likes and reactions aren’t entirely useless, though. They can still build up brand awareness and earned media but shouldn’t be considered as a true measurement of video marketing campaign success.
If You Can’t Measure It, It Didn’t Happen.
Track everything! Always. A simple spreadsheet will do the trick in most cases.
Measuring your video marketing efforts is the only way to know if the content you’re producing is getting results. And we all want to see better results!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Torrey Tayenaka, CEO & Co-Founder, SPARKHOUSE
Torrey Tayenaka is the co-founder and CEO at Sparkhouse, a training video production agency. He is often asked to contribute expertise in publications like Entrepreneur, Single Grain and Forbes. Sparkhouse is known for transforming video marketing and advertising into real conversations.Rather than hitting the consumer over the head with blatant ads, Sparkhouse creates interesting, entertaining and useful videos that enrich the lives of his clients’ customers. In addition to Sparkhouse, Torrey has also founded the companies Eva Smart Shower, Litehouse & Forge54.