How to use video analytics
One metric to rule them all - what's the most important video metric?
There’s an old saying in business that “Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity but Cash is King." In video terms this is a useful analogy when understanding the real performance of your videos. The number of views could be called “vanity metric” which along with social media followers, page views, subscribers, and other metrics are satisfying on paper but don't really impact your business goals or the ROI of your video.
Before we dive into measurements I’m making the assumption that you’ve done a good job of sharing your video with your target audience. You’ve got a catchy title, thumbnail, optimised for SEO, shared with partners and other relevant platforms. There is nothing worse than a great video that’s buried at the bottom of a website.
There are heaps of metrics for videos and you can get very granular if necessary, but for brevity and simplicity we’ ll be looking at the ones most important for audience reach and engagement (note terminology may slightly differ across platforms - YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook etc). So, lets get under the hood of your video analytics to understand how your video is performing. Typically, you’ll find this under your “analytics dashboard” for whichever platform you’re using.
Impressions - an impression is the number of times your video is displayed, whether it played or not. This could be embedded on your website, in search results or in a social media feed.
Views - show you the number of times people actually watched or engaged with your video. However, what constitutes a “view” can differ from platform to platform. For example on Facebook a view is counted after just 3 seconds of viewing, YouTube constitutes a view as 30 seconds (for paid advertising views). In fact qualifying “real” views from fake ones is such a problem now that platforms have to regularly update the algorithms and policies to ensure that videos are viewed by actual humans and not bots.
Likes - the universal standard thumbs up icon, which means the audience liked your video and is a strong indication of audience engagement. You should be gunning for this metric on all your videos. If people disliked your video, be constructive and find out why.
Watch time - unlike the view metric watch time actually measures the total amount of time people watched your video. YouTube actually accounts for watch time, not views, when they rank videos for search.
Average view duration - is the total watch time of your video divided by the total number of video plays, including replays. This metric measures your video’s ability to engage viewers. This should be correlated to the audience retention of your video i.e. where the viewing peaks or troughs are in your watch time. Review these points and see what’s happening in the video to indicate why the peak or trough may be occurring.
Shares - This is the holy grail of video engagement. Your audience liked your video so much they decided to share it with their friends or colleagues. Generally, it’s a high number of shares that make videos go viral.
Comments - Likewise, with comments your audience took the time to tell with you what they think or feel about the video. Actively, engage with these comments, like the praise and constructively explore the criticism. Always enable comments, more often than not opening up to discussion provides more insight than worrying about a few trolls or negative feedback, which you can always flag if inappropriate.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) - Click-Through-Rate measures how well your video encourages viewers to take a desired action. If your CTR is low, consider changing your call-to-action’s placement or messaging in your video. Most platforms allow you to use “cards” or “endscreens” as clickable buttons on the video which makes tracking CTR much simpler.
As you’ve probably realised the most important metrics to understand how well your video has engaged your audience are likes, shares and no. of comments. Hitting these markers shows you’re doing something right, your audience feels something and values the content you’re producing. A formula you can use to get a crude total overall engagement score is:
(likes + comments + shares) / views * 100 = engagement score (%)
Anything over 2% and you’re doing really well.
Engagement analysis should be followed up by CTR and web traffic analysis to understand how the video is affecting your business goals. Use deeper analytics, like audience retention graphs, viewer demographics and comment analysis to further highlight what your audience values. Then loop this insight back into your future video production plans.
Useful questions to ask when analysing your videos:
Am I getting the expected reach (impressions and views) for this video? Maybe the video is poorly optimised for SEO.
Are people dropping off at the beginning or end of the video? Is the intro or outro punchy enough? Is it too short or too long?
Iv’e got lots of views but low engagement, why? Maybe I need to up the emotional ante, be more authentic or give greater value
People love the video, I’m getting high engagement but low views, why is that? Maybe this should be part of a paid campaign
The video is doing great but we’re not seeing an uplift in CTR, why? Is the CTA (Call to Action) clear and compelling? Maybe adding an interactive end-screen will help.
Ultimately, better metrics mean better video which in turn can mean more customers that love your brand. Video analytics should be one part of a varied and strategic approach to video marketing. Things that you measure should account for the context in which they’re created - what type of content you’re creating, why you’re creating it and who is it for. For example an organic campaign of “how to” videos for a niche customer audience might have low reach (impressions & views) but high engagement which is still successful. Conversely, a branded top of funnel promo might have high reach but low engagement.
Success should be defined within the context of your video strategy - not every video has to go viral. Experiment, refine and create value but always with a purpose in mind.
