Measuring the Success of Your Video

For today’s digital generation, image is everything – particularly when it comes to communication. People don’t want to read through text all the time, they just want to interpret messages visually. It’s more appealing.
Facebook, alone, averages more than 3 billion video views per day– over 65% of which happen on mobile devices. This type of on-demand video consumption is driving marketers to produce more impactful videos.
But how do they measure their investment?
There’s an old saying that goes: you get what you measure.
If you don’t measure the success of your videos properly, it’s going to look like a poor use of time and money. This most often leads to budget cuts.
Here’s the thing:
Many companies are under-investing in video content simply because they’ve set up the wrong metrics. For example: B2B companies most often measure the success of videos exclusively in terms of the number of conversions they receive from them. B2C companies most often measure in terms of impressions and views.
Both of these approaches are wrong.
To generate a clear understanding of the success of your video marketing efforts, you need to understand the KPIs of your campaign.

Measuring conversions

Attempting to measure conversions involves measuring how much a video contributes to the bottom line. This means you’re trying to figure out how many people watched your video and then ended up purchasing your product or service.
You can get this number by tracking the number of people who watch your video and then make a purchase within the same session.
This method of measuring video views is the least sophisticated.
More sophisticated methods track the same user over a range of sessions to see if they come back and make a purchase at a later date. In other words, this is an assisted conversion.
Measuring the success of your videos by strictly looking at conversions makes sense for product and sales videos. However, when you only rely on conversions for all videos, issues begin to arise.
By solely looking at conversions from each video, you’re basically saying that each video you create is a product or sales video.

But video is much more than this.

Think about it: What if someone sees your video and then tells a friend, who is looking for a product or service that you offer, about your company? That person then heads directly to your website to become your next customer.
This is automatically considered a non-converting video viewer. However, the video is what brought the customer to your website in the first place!
If you only measure your video success by looking at conversions, you’ll end up with only product or sales videos, making you come off as arrogant.
Don’t skip out on the creative process just because you’re trying to make numbers. Learning and “explainer videos” that are intended to simply educate potential customers are the ones that spread your brand’s story and products. A lot of times it’s these videos doing all of the dirty sales work.

Measuring impressions

Impression-based measurement evaluates the number of people your video has reached. This metric helps to calculate market penetration and brand awareness.
To determine this number, just divide the number of impressions by the cost of distribution determine the cost per thousand impressions.
A more sophisticated method of calculation involves counting only the views that lead to a certain quality threshold. For example, watching more than 15 seconds of the video. These are considered engaged views.
The biggest issue with this type of measurement is when impressions become your sole KPI. This means that every single video published should be immediately engaging and shareable.
Just as we mentioned earlier in the article – if you treat (and measure) every video like a viral social video, then all you’ll be making are viral social videos.
The goal of creating videos for social media ads should be to raise brand awareness. Be sure you’re not sacrificing your message to appeal to a greatest number of viewers just to increase your number of impressions.
Your ultimate objective should be to make sure your viewers are truly impressed.

Which metric should I use?

Now that we’ve covered the two main metrics used to measure the success of videos, which one should you choose?

Measuring for more than just conversions

Let us let you in on a little secret.
Don’t just focus on the number of conversions you’re getting from each video you publish.
Video should be one of your key tools in building a strong brand experience across multiple channels.
When you’re investing so much effort and resources on creating amazing content, you don’t want to waste any time optimizing it for the wrong metric. Do you?

The metric you should be using is time watched.

By focusing on the amount of time your viewers spent on your video, you’ll know exactly what your audience finds meaningful and interesting. It will reveal what kind of content and information you should focus on for them to voluntarily engage with it.
Time watched might not be a metric that is specifically tied to a conversion funnel. However, the modern digital world argues that funnel-based measurements tell an inaccurate story.
This universal measurement is ideal for marketing teams trying to justify investment in video. It is easy to compare video views to the number of hours spent reading blog posts. For example, making it an easy decision to shift content from plain text to videos.
Today’s marketing teams need to realize that they should be optimizing for the amount of time and consideration people are spending on their company’s content rather than the number of conversions.
Accounting for time watched is a metric that can put a more meaningful number to the goal of brand interactions and engagement. Additionally, it challenges marketers to think differently about their promotion strategy!
Here at Covideo, we’ve come up with an easy way to track video views. Viewer Reports allow you to see how many times your video was watched. They also show which sections of your video were watched multiple times. Another added bonus? You get insight into which Exit Links were clicked on too. See for yourself –  Start a free trial.