Many marketers find tracking the ROI of their video campaigns to be tricky, but that is often the result of poorly developed strategy and improper goal-setting.
Broadly speaking, all video marketing will be looking to do one of three things: build brand awareness and trust, increase sales, and educate and inform your customers and potential customers.
Although there will inevitably be overlap between those broad objectives (in the end, all marketing ultimately hopes to increase revenue), you must first define what you want to achieve. If you plan to produce content that targets all three objectives, then think about how you can segment your content and assigning a weight to each metric accordingly.
Once you’ve decided what it is you want your marketing film to achieve, then you can start thinking about how to properly measure success.
Here are 10 essential video marketing metrics that fall into one of three broad measures of success.
A. Measuring Reach and Retention
1. Views
Views are one of the easiest metrics to track—and one of the most misleading. Tracking views gives you a very basic idea of how many people are clicking play on your content, but that’s about it.
2. Play Rate
Play rate gives you more context by dividing views by unique and returning webpage visitors. By showing what proportion of visitors clicked play on your video, this metric is a strong indicator of the effectiveness of various elements, such as video thumbnail, accompanying text, and page positioning. It still doesn’t tell you anything about engagement, though.
3. Watch Time
Unlike views and play rate, watch time hints at engagement levels, and this is a far more valuable metric in establishing ROI. By monitoring how long people are watching your video, you can conclude how many are seeing your CTA (depending on how far in it appears) and, by extension, how effective that CTA is. More generally, watch time will tell you how watchable your brand film is and at what point people are losing interest, which is useful data for producing new content.
B. Measuring Engagement
4. Shares
Social media shares are one of the most obvious and easiest ways to track engagement. Of course, advertising, promotion, and PR also need to be taken into account to accurately establish relative success. A video that’s been shared 1,000 times may appear more successful than one that’s been shared 100 times, but if you’ve pumped significant sums into promoting the former and nothing into the latter, the results aren’t necessarily…
