What 4 Video Metrics Should You Track To Measure Success?4 min read

You’ve taken the important step of investing in video marketing, having taken note of its reliable ROI and incredible creative potential, and you’re ready to reap the rewards. There’s one issue, however: you’re not sure how to gauge success, which puts you in a tough position. Maybe you need to demonstrate results to your hard-to-convince boss — at the very least, though, you want to ensure that your investment is proving fruitful.

How can you tell if your videos are getting meaningful results? It comes down to tracking the most vital metrics. You have to look past the junk metrics (the pieces of information that aren’t really significant) and focus on what actually reflects overall performance. With that information, you can adjust your creative direction as required.

In this piece, we’re going to pick out some of the core video metrics to which you need to be paying very close attention. Let’s get started:

Subscribers

There’s an excellent chance that your videos will be stored on YouTube and embedded elsewhere when needed. Why? Because it makes all the sense in the world. YouTube has exceptional analytics, it’s the biggest video platform in the world, and its embedding function is supported by countless platforms and services.

If you have videos on YouTube, then, you should be thinking about subscribers — though it does depend on the context. If you avoid sending people to YouTube (let’s say, for instance, that you disable many options while embedding your videos, trying to keep people on your site), then viewers won’t be positioned to subscribe. If you let people go to your YouTube channel, though, you should pay close attention to your subscriber total. Anyone who chooses to subscribe to your entire channel is clearly very impressed with your video (or videos).

What 4 Video Metrics Should You Track To Measure Success? 2
Image credit: Pixabay

Click-through rate

Modern ecommerce is all about bringing channels together to great effect: whether you’re using a selection of channels or trying to marshall all of them (there is a distinct difference in approach), you should have a broad range of possible routes to action, and video CTAs are as viable as any others. Even if your explainer video is intended to be purely educational, you should offer some kind of action at the end in case the viewer wants to learn more.

Click-through rate simply gauges how many viewers click on your provided links, and while it varies in importance based on what you’re trying to achieve with a video and which links you include (as well as where you position them and how you frame them), it always matters. Whenever you have an opportunity to push a potential customer in a particular direction, you need to take full advantage of it.

Conversion rate

Getting clicks is great, but what do you achieve with that traffic? If plenty of viewers are clicking on your CTAs but not actually following through with anything (buying from you, for instance, or sending you messages), then there’s major room for improvement. You might think this has little to do with your videos, assuming that any activity that takes place after a click isn’t affected by the video that prompted it, but that isn’t reasonable.

Imagine that you dropped a clickbait CTA into a bland video: something that promised the world, like “Click here to get [product X] for free!”. It would probably get quite a few clicks, but assuming you weren’t able to deliver on that offer, it wouldn’t produce any action. A fantastic video will be able to sell someone on a realistic CTA (it can still be effective), and with the clicker having modest expectations, they’ll be much less likely to be disappointed by what they find.

Viewer dropoff

Let’s say you have a video that lasts for precisely 60 seconds. How many viewers watch the entirety of it? How many watch for 30 seconds before leaving? 20 seconds? 10 seconds? While it can be hard to tell how much of an article gets read before the visitor leaves, video provides a lot more detail about how it’s perceived, and that information is hugely important.

If viewers are watching your entire video, that’s a great sign: it means it’s holding their attention and offering enough value to keep them around. If they’re leaving halfway through, that not only means that the interest level is low — it also means that the fundamental message of the video is compromised, and you can’t be confident that the first 30 seconds are achieving anything.

These aren’t the only video metrics worth considering — there are numerous others that have their uses — but this small selection comprises the essentials. Paying close attention to these 4 metrics should give you invaluable insight into the performance of your videos, allowing you to make the most of the powerful video format.

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