You’ve made a video – now what? It’s not just shooting and uploading the video that’s important – you also have to see how it performs, too.
So you’ve decided to create a video for your business website – congrats, it’s a big step and one that will add immensely to your website, social media presence and overall credibility to your website or business.
For you to really understand how well your video is doing though, there are a number of key metrics that you should be measuring to keep track of how the video is performing across web and social media.
1. View Count
Your view count is exactly what it says on the tin – it’s the amount of times the video has been watched and shows you how far your video reach is. However, remember that video is counted differently across different sites. So, YouTube counts the video after a 30 sec viewing, but Facebook counts it after 3 seconds.
You can increase your reach sharing your video to your email list, via your social media channels or even paying for it to be promoted.
2. Play Rate
The percentage of people who clicked play and began watching your video is what’s known as your ‘play rate’. Play rate is good for measuring how relevant your video is to where you have it on your website and how much visitors are enticed to watch it.
If you want to increase your play rate, you can change the video location, change the thumbnail to be more eye-catching, or make sure the copy around the video is relevant to the video and engaging enough to persuade visitors to click through.
Remember that a more specialised video will have lower play rates than something designed to appeal broadly, so low play rates aren’t a bad thing if you’re targeting a specific audience.
3. Engagement
Engagement is how much of your video the viewer watched and how they engaged with it. Did they stop watching? Did they rewind certain parts and rewatch? Did they skip ahead?
This information is vital for your video to understand how it’s performing and to make future videos better. To make this video better, make it short, concise and clear. Make sure that it does what it will say it will – that they copy and description live up to the information in the video and if people are consistently stopping at a certain point, watch your video objectively and see if you can find out why.
As with play rates, remember low engagement is not necessarily a bad thing.
4. Social Sharing
Social sharing is how much your video is shared through social media channels and helps to work out your reach. If your video is being shared widely you can feel fairly safe that it’s doing what you wanted it to.
5. Click through rate
If you have a CTA you want a CTR – or in more simple language, if you have a Call to Action, your Click Through Rate is the amount of people who click on that CTA link.
Your CTR will show you that your video is effective in encouraging your viewers to take the action that you want them to take.
This is a great metric to track – maybe the most important – as ultimately you’re creating all this great content for your viewers in order to promote your business and ultimately make a sale.
6. Conversion rate
Conversion rate is how many customers or leads you’ve garnered due to a particular piece of content. This number is expressed either according to a client information capture such as a sign up sheet or as a percentage of all viewers who watched the content.
Conversion rate is a tricky one to calculate as you need to work out what level of attribution watching the video means to you – is it a conversion if they watch the video, or part of the video? You can add analytics software such as Google Ads to the video host in order to truly track these metrics.
7. Feedback
Feedback is how your viewers are responding to your video and can be via social media sharing, emails forwards, or a direct response to your company, either in email/social media or person – there are many ways you can garner feedback.
It’s important that you listen to feedback provided particularly the tone of the it. Is it meeting the objective you set out? Usually we consider positive feedback to be important, but if you’re a charity trying to elicit a response to a humanitarian crisis ‘that’s so terrible, we must do something’ could be the best feedback ever. It all depends on the context and your own objectives for your video.
As this is qualitative feedback it’s hard to measure or improve, but worth always monitoring.