Producing and distributing a video marketing campaign is only half the battle. Now, you need to monitor your results and use them to improve future campaigns. Without the vocabulary for your key performance indicators (KPI), you’ll have a difficult time understanding how much your video marketing is really benefiting your organization.
Learning analytics vocabulary is essential to reading your videos’ analytics reports and understanding what those KPIs mean. Further, you’ll be able to pinpoint the weak spots in your campaign and course-correct.
Part one of this series lists the most common and useful analytics terms and what they mean. The next part will help you implement what you’ve learned to improve your video marketing return on investment (ROI).
Impressions
An impression is counted by a platform when your video is loaded and noticed by someone. It’s important to understand that this is different than when someone watches your video. An impression is not a play, so your impressions will almost always be higher than your views. In other words, an impression is when you are scrolling through a feed and pass by some videos that you haven’t necessarily clicked on or watched but noticed as you scrolled.
Views
While impressions are counted just by scrolling through, views are tougher to accomplish. Each platform has its own policy for what counts as a view, but all of them require the person to take an active role in watching the video beyond scrolling past it. Some platforms require that the person clicks play, while others require that the viewer watches for at least three seconds or longer. Before you analyze your results, make sure to research each platform on which you host your video to understand which actions count as a view.
View Rate
View rate is different than views because it is a percentage rather than a number amount. You can find the view rate by dividing the number of views by the number of impressions. In other words, the view rate is the percentage of times a person scrolling by a video stops to watch it. If five people watch your video for every ten times a person scrolls by it, then there would be a 50% view rate.
Average Percentage Watched
The average percentage watched should not be confused with the view rate. Instead of the number of times a person has watched a video, the average percentage watched is the term for the average duration of a video that is watched. To calculate this percentage, you would divide the length of the video typically watched by the full length of the video. In other words, if a person has watched three minutes of a five-minute video, they would have watched 60% of the video. You could choose to calculate this number across all platforms hosting your video, or look at the average of each platform individually for different analyses. Overall, this result is a great way to start understanding whether you have high-engagement videos.
CTA Card Clicks
Not every platform has call-to-action (CTA) cards, but if you are publishing on a platform like YouTube or Vimeo, you’ll have the option to create CTA cards that tell your viewer what to do next after watching the video. For these platforms, you’ll have the opportunity to analyze how effective your CTA cards are as well. The most common analytic for CTA cards is “clicks,” which would tell you how many times your viewers have followed through on the direction you’ve given them.
Submissions
Finally, “submissions” is another analytical tool that isn’t available on every platform but is very valuable to use. The number of submissions will tell you how many times your viewers have submitted information through a form you’ve created for the video. For example, if you prompt them to submit their email address, you’ll be able to see how persuasive you were in obtaining email addresses through your video marketing campaign.
Use Analytics to Understand Your Video Marketing ROI
Looking through data isn’t an exciting task for most people, but it’s necessary. If your goal is to obtain an email list of prospects, how will you know if you’re successful without digging into the number of submissions your video has gained? By learning to read analytics, you’ll more deeply understand how your audience is interacting with your videos and what you can do to create more effective video marketing campaigns in the future.
Analytics helps you get a tangible ROI from your video marketing efforts. In the second part of this series, we will dive into how you can turn this knowledge into actionable insights.
For more information on understanding analytics vocabulary, contact Monzo Media Productions.
