With half of all website data now attributed to video content, it’s never been more important for marketers to make informed and data-driven decisions about their video marketing campaigns. Channels like YouTube and Facebook take up much of the focus of for video, but these channels only provide so much insight into how a video is actually performing. They say Facebook has 8 billion video views per day, but a view on Facebook is tallied as being longer than 3 seconds. Is that really success? For most marketers, probably not.

Almost universally, the ultimate goal of each and every business is to capture a prospect's information and eventually nurture them to a purchase or conversion. (Whatever that might be) Video can help with this process, by providing a human connection and a platform to tell the story of your brand in a timely manner.

The ability to A/B test and iterate on campaigns shouldn’t be limited to traditional channels like search engines, landing pages, email, or social. That’s why this blog post covers what marketers should actually be tracking when it comes to their video marketing strategy.

The (Still Relevant) Vanity Metrics

The term vanity metrics has always been associated with the notion that they are useless metrics and that no action can be taken based on them. While there are more important metrics that we’ll cover later, that’s not to say that these vanity metrics mean absolutely nothing. They give a quick snapshot of content actually resonating, even if they don’t translate directly to marketers end goal.

As mentioned, views can vary based on the channel, and often times don’t mean that much. But if a video racks up thousands or millions of views, it’s a pretty good indicator that at least something is working with your video content.  For example, Facebook only gets as granular as this:

These numbers are “nice-to-haves,” data that can paint a corner of a picture that will be your full video marketing campaigns. On YouTube, it’s a similar experience to Facebook to analyze how your content is performing:

YouTube will also give users their top geographies, gender, traffic source, and playback location to their users viewing video statistics.

Unfortunately, these numbers lack the context and granularity to truly define how a video is performing. It’s important to run video everywhere, across all channels, and measuring the success of the video content you are producing. (Sidenote: you can view all of your Facebook & YouTube data inside of TwentyThree along side natively hosted video data.) The views, shares, and comments all let you know that your content is resonating, but that’s where these metrics end. What should you actually be measuring? 

What Video Marketing Metrics to Measure?

Engagement and conversions are the lifeblood of any marketing campaign that is being measured. How long did someone stay on a blog post? Did they convert on your CTA to download your eBook? Did an eCommerce product post on Twitter result in a purchase on the website? All these questions are asked when measuring the success of traditional marketing campaigns. And video is no different.

Engagement

In order to properly measure your video engagement rate, you’ll need a video marketing platform that hosts videos on either landing pages, website, or your own video hub. To get users to your website, use short video snippets on social and YouTube to drive users to your website with tracking links to view the entire video. Once they are on your website, engaging with video, you’ll be able to properly measure their interactions and track their behavior across your entire website.

Video engagement (along with the vanity metrics above) can encapsulate a few different things:

• Load-to-play rate
• Playthrough average
• Drop off rate
• Usage (Time of day)

These metrics can tell you exactly what someone is watching, but not who. True video engagement is identifying a specific contact/lead and lead score them based on their activity. Video marketing platforms can tell you this information via detailed heat maps. (even inside of marketing automation software like HubSpot and Marketo):

This information is the true measure of success for video content, making sure that the right people are engaging with the right content. For example, if a prospect watches a product video, it’s important to engage them even further by sending an automated follow-up email asking if they have questions about what they watched. Going beyond views and locations can drive revenue and pipeline.

Conversions

Engaging prospects is only one-half of the marketing funnel. Conversions from video can also be measured and optimized beyond vanity metrics. Just liked gated content, collectors can be placed on videos to increase leads:

Collectors should be tracked and tested:

You can also see who converts, and then track their engagement after they’ve been turned into a lead. This data allows for marketers to measure the 50% of their website data that comes from video. It allows videos to be truly A/B tested, whether that’s location on a page or what words you use on a collector, it’s vitally important for marketers to be measuring video just like every other marketing campaign. Send this data to marketing automation software and CRM’s for the sales team to act on the behavior; or automate workflows to nurture prospects to increased revenue. Only then, can your video marketing strategy be data-driven.

Want to learn how to properly measure your video marketing metrics? Sign up for a free trial of TwentyThree.