Imagine that you have just finished weeks of work creating the ideal video ad for your company. The message is really obvious, the narration is spot-on, and the images are breathtaking. The problem lies in how to determine whether your film is truly having an effect. How can you assess its effectiveness and pinpoint areas that need work?

Let me introduce you to video analytics, the modern marketer’s superpower. You can gain important insights to improve your video marketing approach by utilizing data and metrics. Throughout this process, key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential for determining how effective your videos are at various points in the marketing funnel.

The secret to reaching your objectives, whether they be to raise customer engagement, promote transactions, or raise brand exposure, is to measure and analyze video performance indicators. It enables you to refine your advertising, make data-driven decisions, and determine what appeals to your audience.

Video analytics, as used in marketing, is the act of gathering, evaluating, and assessing information on how well your video campaigns are performing. Marketers may evaluate the performance of their video content, refine their approaches for more engagement and conversions, and eventually improve return on investment (ROI) by utilizing a data-driven approach.

Measuring Key Video Metrics

Now that we understand the significance of video content KPIs, let’s dive into the essential metrics that help measure and evaluate the performance of video campaigns. These metrics serve as guideposts along the marketing journey, providing valuable insights into audience engagement and campaign success.

1. Views

One of the most basic yet essential metrics to measure is “views.” It indicates the number of times a video has been watched by viewers. Higher view counts suggest a larger reach and potential for brand exposure. However, it’s important to note that views alone don’t necessarily translate into successful campaigns. To dig deeper, we need to analyze other key metrics.

2. Watch time

Next up is “watch time,” which measures the total amount of time viewers spend watching a video. This metric helps determine how engaging and captivating your video content is. A longer watch time suggests that viewers are highly engaged and find value in your videos, while shorter watch times may indicate a need for improvement in content or storytelling.

3. Engagement rate

The engagement rate is another crucial metric to consider. It encompasses various factors like likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates (CTRs). These metrics provide insights into how well your videos are resonating with the audience and encourage interaction or action.

4. Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures the number of viewers who take a desired action after watching a video, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter. This metric helps evaluate the effectiveness of your video in driving actual business results.

Real-life examples demonstrate how measuring these key metrics can optimize video campaigns. Take GoPro, for instance. By analyzing their watch time data, they discovered that their viewers were most engaged when watching extreme sports videos. Armed with this insight, they created more similar content, resulting in increased engagement and brand loyalty.

Video analytics offer marketers a wealth of data to gain insights into their audience’s behavior, preferences, and engagement levels. By understanding the types of video analytics available, marketers can tailor their strategies to specific target audiences and maximize the impact of their campaigns.

• Playback location data

One type of video content analytics is playback location data, which provides valuable information about where viewers are watching videos. This data allows marketers to identify the platforms or channels that are most effective in reaching their target audience. For example, a brand targeting Gen Z may find that their videos are predominantly watched on mobile devices, indicating a need to optimize videos for mobile viewing and focus more on platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

• Demographics

Another necessary type of video analytics is user demographics. This data provides insights into the characteristics of the audience watching the videos, such as age, gender, location, and interests. By analyzing user demographics, marketers can create targeted content that resonates with their specific audience segments. For instance, if a beauty brand finds that a majority of its viewers are young females interested in skincare, it can create videos tailored to this demographic’s interests and needs.

• Engagement

Engagement metrics are also crucial in video content analysis. These metrics include likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates. They indicate how viewers are interacting with the video content and can help marketers gauge the level of engagement and interest generated by their videos. By tracking engagement metrics across different videos, marketers can identify what types of content resonate best with their audience and refine their strategies accordingly.

In today’s digital landscape, marketers must track video metrics across various distribution channels to gain a comprehensive understanding of their campaign performance. Each channel offers unique insights that can inform strategy adjustments and help maximize the effectiveness of video marketing efforts.

For example, consider a brand like Red Bull that leverages multiple distribution channels such as YouTube, Instagram, and their website. By tracking video metrics across these platforms, they can gain valuable insights into the performance of their videos on each channel. They can analyze engagement levels, watch time, and click-through rates to identify which channels are most effective in reaching their target audience.

Tracking video metrics across channels also allows marketers to adjust their strategies based on channel-specific insights. For instance, if a brand discovers that their YouTube videos have a significantly higher engagement rate compared to their Instagram videos, they can allocate more resources to creating and promoting content on YouTube. This approach ensures that marketers are investing their efforts where they yield the maximum impact.

By consistently tracking video metrics across channels, marketers can stay agile and adapt their strategies to meet the evolving needs and preferences of their audience. It enables them to make data-driven decisions that optimize their video campaigns and drive results.

In today’s ever-evolving digital landscape, measuring and analyzing video performance metrics is essential for marketers looking to optimize their campaigns. By delving into key video KPIs, such as views, watch time, engagement rate, and conversion rate, marketers can make data-driven decisions to enhance their video marketing strategies.

Leveraging powerful video analytics platforms and tracking metrics across different distribution channels allows for continuous measurement and improvement. So, don’t just create videos and hope for the best—unlock the power of video content analysis to drive maximum impact.

How do You Measure Video Marketing?

As is always the case, begin with your video project’s goals. From there, you may start tying particular metrics to your objectives and gauging your progress. Metric reporting will be simpler if you give your video content more thought at the outset.

Read Also: Predictive Analytics For Improving Marketing ROI

To make sure you’re receiving a complete picture of the success of your video content, it’s critical to track multiple metrics. You haven’t honed in on your goals enough, though, if you’re attempting to monitor too many metrics without realizing how they will affect them.

There are several elements and questions that you need to ask yourself when creating your video content. Once you have these answers, you can begin optimizing your video performance by publishing, promoting, analyzing, and repeating your video efforts.

• When should you publish or send this video? Publishing time can be crucial and it’s important to remember that relevance is key.
• Where will this video live? Is this video for a blog, website page, social media, or email campaign? You’ll want to make sure you are placing it in the best place for your audience to see it.

When it’s time to start analyzing your video performance, the amount of metrics to track can be overwhelming. The following are seven easy metrics that you can start measuring to begin understanding your marketing efforts.

1. View Count

View count is the raw number of times your video has been watched. It also indicates the ‘reach’ of your content. It’s important to remember though, that every platform tracks this metric differently. For example, YouTube’s view count means that someone has clicked on your video and watched a full 30 seconds, whereas on Facebook they have to click on it but only watch 3 seconds, so there is a large difference. 

How to increase video view count:

DOs:

• Share your video with your audience through social media and communication channels such as email
• Share your video with relevant influencers
• Pay to promote your video on channels where your audience can be found

DON’Ts:

• Spam your video into all channels. 
• Post your video in an unrelated channel without relevance

2. Play Rate

Play rate is the amount of visitors to your page who clicked ‘play’ and began watching your video. This is a good metric to track to understand the placement of your video on the page. If you are having a lot more visitors on the page but not a lot of video plays, you may need to adjust where the video is on the page. Your visitors need to be enticed to watch your video and certain locations may work better than others.

How to increase video play rate:

DOs:

• Increase the size of your video embed
• Change the location of your video on the page to be more front and center
• Make sure the copy complementing the video is relevant
• Explore the option of moving a video to a more relevant page or location

DON’Ts:

• Spam the play button on your own page to ‘boost’ your play rate
  
  

3. Engagement

Engagement shows how much of your video the visitors watched. This metric is shown as a percentage. Average engagement shows you how much of your video all viewers watched on average and this is also shown as a percentage. This is a useful metric to be able to see how long people are watching, where they might be stopping, and where they may have rewatched parts. Engagement is also relevant to every type of video in the industry.

How to increase video engagement:

DOs:

• Keep your content concise and clear
• Fulfill your audience’s expectations
• Pay attention to average engagement. Can you pinpoint where people are dropping off?

DON’Ts:

• Let your video flood with unnecessary information
• Change your subject quickly

4. Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate or CTR, is the percentage of viewers that click on CTA’s you include in the content. Adding these to your videos encourages viewers to take a specific action and ties in on engagement. It’s the most important metric if you’re looking to drive your audience after watching the video. However, make sure the CTA that you are adding matches the type and tone of the video.

How to increase video click-through rate:

DOs:

• Alter your CTA. Change the placement if it’s not effective
• Improve your average engagement if viewers are dropping off before the CTA
• Make sure your CTA is highly relevant to the content of your video

DON’Ts:

• Put your CTA at the end and forget about it
• Let the link of your CTA expire or change. Make sure you keep the link live

5. Social Sharing

Social sharing shows how much people are sharing your video content. This is measured by numbers across social channels. This is a good measure of how appealing your video is to your target audience and how likely they are to share this content. Although by itself this metric may not mean much, social sharing leads to more views on your videos and can lead to greater brand awareness. 

How to increase video social sharing:

DOs:

• Ask your viewers to share your content if they enjoyed it
• Create content that is naturally shareable
• Kick start the sharing of your videos by having relevant influencers spread the video to their audience

DON’Ts:

• Beg viewers to share your content
• Force feed your viewers to constantly share your content
  
  

6. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the number of leads or customers that you have gained thanks to a piece of video content. This usually requires a separate analytics software (like Google Analytics or HubSpot) and works hand in hand with an attribution model.

How to increase video conversion rate:

DOs:

• Make your video relevant to what your target audience wants to know at that stage of the funnel
• Always provide valuable information; answer your audience’s questions
• Place your video in the right area of your website to help drive conversions

DON’Ts:

• Force feed your information to the viewer
• Push a sale on the viewer
  
  

7. Feedback

Feedback is how the viewers react to and comment on your video content. To get a true feel of the reception of your video, you really need to listen to your target audience and the communities that they engage with. Gauge the feedback you receive to help understand the viewer’s emotions and make improvements on the video if necessary. Don’t forget when you’re looking at this metric that it’s more of a human aspect than a data figure.

Hours Watched

Understanding the total hours watched can provide a deeper insight into overall engagement, indicating not just how many people watched, but the duration of their attention. This metric is particularly useful for brand affinity marketing efforts and long-form episodic content and can help assess sustained interest over time.

There are several different strategies for marketing, two of the most popular being lead generation and brand affinity. According to HubSpot, lead generation is defined as the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer. Brand affinity is marketing so that people become aware of your brand. 

It’s important in the early stages of planning your video marketing efforts that you know which marketing strategy you will be focusing on. For example, creating a video series is a better strategy for brand affinity than for lead generation where you may use video to guide a prospect through their buyer journey. 

Although brand affinity may feel like you’re trying to track how people are talking about your brand, there are metrics that you can use to track its impact and even see how it’s impacting your sales efforts. Our top choices for video optimization and analytics are HubSpot, Wista, and Databox. In order to see the highest level of data that we can for us and our customers, we’ve combined them and can see a much bigger analytics picture.

Video Marketing Optimization

In order to track view count, play rate, view engagement levels, etc. that we discussed above, you should upload your videos into Wistia. Wistia has some of the best tracking tools available and allows you to directly embed your videos on your website. These video embeds are still videos that will be found by Google and will pop up in search results, but instead of sending them to a YouTube video will send them to your website. 

Wistia offers a lot more customization options with their videos as well. You are able to crop videos to get better engagement and change the color of the play button so it matches your brand colors. You can also add CTAs to the end of your videos to continue driving your audience toward a specific task.

After you’ve examined a per video analysis, you need to start looking into how this video can affect your leads. Integrating Wistia into HubSpot allows you to see more into how your videos are impacting the buyer’s journey of your customers. As shown in the image below, this client’s customer watched 14 videos on 6 different website visits and totaled over 45 minutes of watching these videos before eventually making a purchase. 

When you start measuring your video success with HubSpot, you’re able to understand which leads are watching videos, the rate of customers who watched videos, how your videos grow over time, and the impact of video on your sales funnel.  

There are several options to choose from to host your videos. We’ve broken down four of the most popular to help you make the decision that’s right for you and your business.

YouTube

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world and has the largest video platform. If you think or you know that your audience is going to be searching on YouTube, definitely add your videos to the platform. YouTube can also be a great place to add your videos even if you have them on another platform and create an additional video channel. 

Vimeo

Many people choose to use Vimeo because they have a paid subscription that gives you even more metrics and you can customize your videos to look better than a YouTube video embed. However, if you are thinking about choosing Vimeo, we suggest that you actually go with Wistia or Vidyard. The reason is that you will not only be losing money but losing your ability to use YouTube and its powerful search engine. Furthermore, Wistia also allows you to customize your videos however you want.

Wistia

Wistia is the best video tool to use for data-driven marketing and branding. Although it has many similarities to Vidyard, it’s really the best choice for video marketing. One great Wistia-specific feature is Wistia Channels which provides a lovely presentation for your videos in a Netflix-style setting that encourages binge-watching. 

Vidyard

Vidyard natively integrates with HubSpot and is better to use if your focus is more on sales. It’s a simple tool to use and has comparable pricing to Wistia. Vidyard also has a highly flexible feature with its buttons that allows for more creative potential in videos.