Videos are becoming more and more important to business marketing. This is because customers don’t want to spend time reading about a product when they can get the information more quickly through a video. That means you should include videos on your website to promote your products and show your industry expertise. At the same time, you also need to track how well your videos are doing to make sure you get a return on your investment (ROI). Here are four video metrics that will help you track your success.
Video View Rates
Image via Flickr by SeanWf
Your videos are meant to increase brand awareness and drive sells. You want as many people to view your videos as possible. Video views are one of the easiest metrics to track because most platforms have built-in software to do this for you. You can track views based on region, day, time, and any demographic information that you are collecting.
You should track both unique views and total views. Your unique views counter tells you how many people have seen your videos. Total video views tells you how many times your videos have been seen, regardless of whether someone watched more than once or not. When your total video views are much higher than your unique video views, it shows that your video was effective and engaging. it’s one of the first places you should evaluate for video ROI.
Play-Through Rate
Another metric you should be tracking is the average amount of time people watch your video, also known as your play-through rate. If people are leaving half way through your video, you know that your video is not engaging enough. People have short attention spans, which is why your videos should be as short as possible to minimize the amount of people who click away early. You can use your play-through rate metrics to determine what is working in your video marketing campaigns and what isn’t.
Conversion Rate
Since one of the main purposes of your videos is to sell items, it makes sense to track your conversion rate or click-through rate. This tells you how many people were interested in the products and services that you advertised in your videos and then wanted to know more information. If you have a low click-through rate, you might want to try placing your video in a different location on your page and providing a more enticing thumbnail. People are more likely to click if you tell them to do it, too, so focus on your messaging for higher conversions.
Subscriber and Social Share Rates
Even if your video is not promotional, you should still be looking at the different metrics associated with it. For instance, if your video is about building brand awareness, it makes sense to track social shares and new subscriber rates that resulted from the video. This will help you know if your video is performing well and doing what you intended it to do.
If you’re not tracking your video metrics, there’s no way of knowing whether your videos are giving you a good return on investment. There are a lot of things you can learn from video metrics to help you improve future videos and help your current videos perform better. Start tracking those metrics today!
