7 Metrics to Focus on When Measuring Success of Video Marketing Efforts in 2024

How to Start Measuring Video Marketing Success

The first step is always to start with the objectives of your video project. From there, you can tie specific metrics to your goals and begin measuring success. The more initial planning you do for your video content, the easier reporting on metrics will be.

It’s important to track more than one metric to ensure you’re getting a comprehensive view of the success of your video content. However, if you’re trying to track too many metrics without understanding the impact on your goals, then you probably haven’t narrowed down your objectives enough. 

Elements to Optimize Video Performance

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.
  
  

7 Metrics to Focus on When Analyzing Videos

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.

🌟 Extra Metric: 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 the sustained interest over time.

Tools to Measure the Success of Your Videos

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.

Start Tracking Your Videos

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.

Video Marketing Optimization

Once you begin doing video optimization, you can start differentiating what things actually create an impact. For example, one of our clients had a long and stylish home page video with reasons why you should work with them... While it had a lot of views, there was a very low engagement rate. So we created a shorter and very value-oriented video for them and immediately saw higher engagement and click-through rates, but most importantly their conversion rate grew 25 times from one video to another. This level of impact is what can happen when you’re actually looking at the numbers and tracking them on a per-video basis.

Understanding How Video Affects Your Leads

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 closed who watched videos, how your videos grow over time, and the impact of video on your sales funnel.  

YouTube vs Vimeo vs Wistia vs Vidyard

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. 

When it’s time to start analyzing your video performance there are many different metrics and tools that you can use to ensure success. Contact us to learn more about our video services and how we can help you.