When you create marketing content, including video content, it’s important that you’re able to calculate your ROI.
When you’re calculating ROI, it’s helping you figure out if you’ve succeeded with a particular business goal, but it gets tricky. Sales aren’t always the best metric to use when looking at the performance of a video. Videos are also often part of a larger marketing campaign, so you don’t know where to attribute certain results.
The following are some of the critical marketing metrics that matter for videos to help you not only calculate ROI but see where you can make improvements in your strategy.
1. Engagement
Engagement is one of the key factors that come into play with boosting the organic reach of your video. If a video resonates with a portion of your audience, it’s likely to do the same with all of it.
When you look at engagement, you can extract qualitative data as well.
You can look at the comments to see what emotional impact your video had on people when they watched it and using this engagement data is going to help you determine which topics you should be focusing on in the future.
Another element of engagement is looking at social shares for your videos.
When you see the social shares, and you’re integrating them into the metrics you’re focusing on, you’re getting a clearer picture of the loyalty of your audience. When people share your content on social media, it shows the value of it and your brand. It’s also boosting your credibility.
Along with using engagement as a metric to guide marketing, you can also use the feedback you get from video comments to make improvements going forward.
2. View Count
View count is a basic metric, and sometimes it’s described as a vanity metric, but still, at the core of marketing, it is important. You need to know how many people are viewing these videos.
The get more in-depth here, you can compare how many people are viewing them on different platforms.
For example, you can compare video views on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
If no action is being taken from the views, then it’s a vanity metric, as mentioned, but it does show you what you need to do in the initial few seconds of your videos to get people to watch further.
That’s important information.
3. Play Rate
Your play rate is a metric if you have landing pages where videos are embedded. This metric tells you how many people actually took action to click play and begin watching your video. This is not the same as them scrolling down a feed where auto-play is enabled. The metric is important because it indicates someone was willing to take action.
Your play rate can be calculated if you divide the number of people who played the video by the total number of visitors accessing your landing page. If you don’t like what you see as far as this metric, you might want to reconsider your thumbnails and also experiment with where the video is located on your landing page.
Even more significant than the initial play rate is the replay rate. Your replay rate means people in your audience found your video so compelling they wanted to watch it again. Or, and this is a big one, they could have found the content confusing, so they need to watch it again. Make sure that you’re assessing this metric and are able to discern which is driving replays.
4. Watch Time
It feels great when you have a video with a lot of views. You can start to feel enthusiastic, but we’ll repeat it again—it’s a metric to look at, but also a vanity metric in a lot of ways.
If you want to know how well the content in your video resonates with your audience, look at the watch time. This is, of course, how much time your audience is spending watching your video.
If you’re hosting your videos on YouTube, this metric is called “estimated total minutes spent viewing your content.” On Facebook, it’s “minutes watched,” and sometimes you’ll see it as “duration watched.”
If you have an eight-minute video and viewers are watching a minute on average, this is a red flag.
5. Subscriber or Follower Growth
When you reach new audiences, and people feel like your video appeals to them or offers them some type of value, they’re more likely to subscribe or follow you. This also helps you dig down deeper and learn more about your audience and who you’re attracting. This information can be used as you create buyer personas and craft tailored content for your audience.
6. Click-Through Rate
Your click-through rate, or CTR, is what’s going to tell you whether or not your viewers are taking the action you want them to. If you have a low CTR, there are a lot of things you can do. For example, maybe you experiment with changing where you place your CTR in your video.
Most data on audience retention show that people don’t watch videos all the way through, so with this in mind, should you consider putting your CTA in the middle of your video or closer to the beginning?
Maybe instead of that, you should be thinking about how to create more engaging video content so that your viewers get all the way through to the end.
Along with your click-through rate, what about your conversion metrics? If this is the goal to measure your CTR, you need to make sure you’re actually including the CTA. You should be directing viewers to take the next step, whatever that might be.
7. Impressions
Finally, impressions are a surface-level metric that lets you see how many people are seeing your content. Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, and they’re also measured every time someone sees your content.
While it’s a surface metric, if you’re not getting a lot of impressions, then you’re not going to do well in any of the other listed metrics. You’re doing something that’s not working in how you’re trying to reach your audience. If your audience doesn’t see your video, they can’t watch it.
That could mean, as one example, you’ve posted it in the wrong location.
