Video content has been the backbone of today's Internet viral marketing. It's been at the forefront in engaging the audience and creating a lasting connection between your brand and its target market.
With videos becoming easy to access these days (thanks to the massive popularity of social media platforms that enable video consumption), brands can pull up a short behind-the-scenes clip of their office and expect it to be viral rather quickly. That’s because social platforms are now changing direction to provide a more concentrated video section.
However, not every popular video is successful in terms of driving more sales. People can just watch and keep scrolling down like other videos on their feed. This is where you should know the video metric to see if your content drives an outcome.
What is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is an efficient strategy in giving your brand a voice, building credibility, and establishing authority. It can create emotional connections between the audience and brands. However, the problem is that most marketers fail to understand if the video has succeeded in attracting customers.
In fact, marketing professionals should first determine the goal of videos and also acknowledge the ways they can put the content to use for marketing their business and increasing conversion rates. According to statistics, over 90% of users say that product videos are useful for making purchase decisions. The reason is more and more people prefer to watch short product videos for eCommerce, rather than read a long description of your product. For your eCommerce growth, you should also use the Shopify abandoned cart app and engage more buyers. If therefore, you use a professional online video maker and share engaging videos, you can easily attract and retain new audiences.
In a business, growth metrics have been linked to the increase in revenue and profitability. With video marketing, it's no different. The same concept applies.
Understanding video growth metrics will tell you if your content has gained enough attention to drive sales or leads. You can then conclude if the campaign works by analyzing metrics and reconsider using the same strategy for future product launches.
7 Video Marketing Growth Metrics You Should Measure
Source: Freepik
1. Video Views
This is the total number of views your videos receive across all platforms where it has been published. However, you won't know if all those numbers are from different users watching your videos.
For example, ten total views may not only come from ten users, but they may be from five other people watching the content twice. This will be counted as a unique view, a metric to know if your viewers watch videos from different devices and re-visit your videos. You can check the total unique views in the YouTube Analytics dashboard.
While you can't predict if those views are from the same users, the total number simply means that the video is popular on the internet. You can expect high popularity to reach a wider audience beyond your reach because people may stumble upon your videos from another platform.
It's important to track this metric to know what kind of engagement each platform generates for your video content. For instance, if your video receives a lot of views on Facebook, it means that you should consider using Facebook in future campaigns. On the other hand, if YouTube videos generate low traffic for you, you can try some YouTube alternatives to analyze what part is failing to engage the audience to check your videos.
Nas Daily is a successful content creator with 20M followers on Facebook and 6M subscribers on YouTube. He gains more success on Facebook as his latest videos always surpass a million views within a couple of days.
Nas Daily on Facebook
Nas Daily on YouTube
2. Play Rate
Play rate is the number of people who have played your video content, not just watched it. You can count this metric when the viewer has watched at least half of the video before stopping or clicking away.
With this metric, you can determine if your videos are engaging enough to keep audiences in their seats. If they manage to play 50% of the video, there is a chance they will come back for more until they complete it. This also means that viewers are interested in what you’re offering in your videos.
3. Time Watched
Some marketers use this stat in their analysis for each keyword targeted, so they know if people are viewing their videos long enough. It works better than Average Time Views Per Visit, which counts as the total minutes an average visitor spent on a piece of content you posted.
If people watch the video more hours than the Average Time Views Per Visit, then there is a good chance they like your content. Videos could be an excellent marketing strategy because the more videos they consume from your brand, the higher the chance that they would purchase products from you in the future.
4. Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is crucial to know in every video played. It counts as the number of views with a "thumbs up" or a comment from the viewers. With this metric, you can find out if your video content is engaging enough to make people click and watch it again.
There are times that people may come across your videos by accident, but if there's engagement on it, they will check what other videos you have created for them to stay longer on your website or social media channels.
5. Social Sharing
There are tons of social media platforms that allow cross-platform content distribution or video sharing. Social sharing indicates that people are interested in the video enough to urge them to share the content with others. This may give insights about how many views per visitor should have positive outcomes for your business after counting the total social sharing on your video.
Social sharing is the highest compliment video creators have because people willingly distribute the content without asking. It's also critical in measuring whether you've got the right audience for them to be excited watching your videos.
The greater social sharing means organic traffic to your page. Hence, the higher revenue you’ll get since this traffic comes from people who are already interested in your brand.
6. Click-through Rate (CTR)
It's the number of people who clicked for each view that your video gets. This metric shows them if viewers are interested in what you offer through a video. You should know that there's no specific or good CTR standard because it varies depending on the industry you're working in. However, most CTR goes by 2%, and anything more than 2% will be considered the above-average.
More views don't always mean higher CTR because people may pass by without even checking out the content of the video. However, it can be a reverse effect where they watched it but didn't click on it, so fewer people would see the actual content.
Therefore, it's important to check this metric alongside Engagement Rate & Play Rate to know how effective your video marketing efforts are towards getting more customers around the globe.
7. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate counts as the number of leads generated from every 100 views or visitors who came across your landing page or blog post containing your videos.
It goes with the Click-through Rate and Engagement Rate of your videos. If they clicked but didn't watch it, there's no conversion because you're not getting that actual purchase or any information from them for you to contact personally. Thus, making your video marketing efforts ineffective.
Conclusion
You should always check video marketing growth metrics to know if your content gains enough attention to drive conversions through sales or leads. Tracking these numbers will tell how well your video works and help you decide whether you want to use the same strategy in future product launches.
Once you measure all these metrics, it's easier to find strategies that could help boost your video marketing. However, the most important thing is to make sure that your content is well-thought and compelling enough for viewers to click on the post and watch the whole clip until the end.
You should make videos worth watching because many people would rather skip or close them immediately if they feel like it's not any more interesting than other viral videos that go around social media sites. You can't just waste a big chunk of their time. So, start creating content that will give them a great first impression through your social media channels.