Video content is growing in demand, and for many brands it is now one of the main ways to connect with their target audience. If used correctly, video content that is targeted well can help individuals move through the various stages of the customer journey, ultimately resulting in more conversions.
To really be considered effective, video marketing must be considered an iterative process; relevant results should be recorded, the content and publishing tactics tweaked and monitored. Although measuring the success of video can be tricky, it really is vital to creating relevant content that is served effectively to its target audience.
The most important thing to decide upon before you even think about analysing video content, is what good looks like for you. Which factors will define success, and how do these tie into the overall aims of your business? Once you’ve chosen these, you’ll be able to tailor the way you plan, produce and publish your videos towards achieving your goals.
When it comes to measuring the success of video, your choice of metric is key, and should be directly related to what you’re trying to achieve. Here are some themes that you may want to consider.
Engagement and completed views
Rather than simply measuring video views, try looking at engagement levels. These will indicate how much of your video was watched by your viewers. An engagement graph will also tell you when your viewers are dropping off, and will let you know if they’ve seen your call to action or brand message.
Insights such as these are extremely important, as they can help you to refine your video content, and can pinpoint exact positions where viewers lose interest. However, engagement levels can also be deceptive. A low engagement percentage does not necessarily mean that your video wasn’t relevant to your target audience.
Completed video views will give you a good indication of how many people watched your video to the end. A high number of completed views suggests that the message in your video resonated with your target audience, and that it was served to them at a convenient time and on the right platform.
Many factors that affect the number of completed views a video receives should be considered in the planning stage, before a video is produced and published. These include video length, editing, sound and subtitles. Although it may be too late to amend these when measuring the success of a video, it’s useful to understand the reasons why a video that seemingly hits the mark in terms of brand messaging, may not have a high number of completed views.
Although this metric will tell you a lot about how well a video performed, it also has a few flaws that you need to be aware of. For example, the number of completed views won’t distinguish between someone who attentively watched all of your video, and someone who just left their computer on while they went to make a cup of tea.
If possible, the engagement level and number of completed views should be combined with another metric, such as one of the below, to provide a well-balanced view of a video’s overall success.
Video click-throughs
To assess how much traffic a video drove to a specific webpage, you can monitor video click throughs. These will help you to establish how clear your video’s call to action was, and how many viewers actually took action as a result of it.
If your overall goals are to increase awareness and encourage viewers to visit your brand’s website, video click throughs are a great way to measure success, and provide a tangible metric that is easily understood throughout your business.
Conversion rate
The conversation rate refers to the amount of sales or leads that have been generated from a video view, and depends on the conversion options offered on your website. These could include anything from a customer making a purchase or completing a contact form, to calls received on a tracked phone number or newsletter subscriptions gained.
Conversions can be slightly more complicated to track than the above metrics, but this can be done fairly easily through the use of third party software such as Google Analytics. Although they’re not always readily available to view, conversion rates really are worth tracking, as they act as evidence for high-performing video content and clearly tie into overall business objectives.
Social sharing and feedback
These metrics are easy to measure, and you’re probably already familiar with reporting on them. Social sharing is important, as it helps your video reach more people, and increases view count. It also indicates whether your audience appreciate the content you’re publishing, and if they deem it valuable enough to share with their own networks.
The sentiment of any comments on your video can also help you to judge its effectiveness. Collecting this information and sharing it with the relevant people can help to improve the content you produce in the future, and can help to understand reasons why a video did or didn’t succeed.
The bigger picture
The best way to measure the success of a video depends greatly on its main objective, and what is important to your business as a whole. Once these indicators have been defined, various metrics can be monitored and compared to gain a better understanding of a video’s overall performance. It’s not all about quantitative results though - sentiment towards your video content also plays a big role in whether or not it meets its goals.
Remember to look at the bigger picture - if a video doesn’t receive many completed views, but has a thousands of shares on social media, it may not have achieved what it set out to do, but could have improved brand awareness in the meantime. These insights will help you to refine your video strategy, and find the formula that works best for you and your brand.
Jessica Gow is a content planner at Headstream
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