Keeping on top of your video metrics is a key aspect of measuring, developing and improving your social media advertising strategy, as well as social video plan.
With videos across the web reeling in billions of daily views and over 70% of marketers in the US planning on using videos in their social ads, whether you can afford to not get to the bottom of your video performance is the question you need to be asking yourself.
If you can make the most of a video metric, you’ll be able to understand what viewers connect with, as well as crack the key to driving higher engagement online.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at 10 of the key metrics that affect the success or failure of your social videos.
10 Social Video Metrics to Include in Your Marketing Reports
Take a look at these 10 metrics and find out the impact they can have on your social media marketing plan.
1) View count
It’s always good to start with an obvious one. The number of views that your video is getting is a simple metric to track, as it’s just a flat number of how many people saw your video.
Although the definition of a ‘view’ varies from network to network, it’s always based on someone watching a small section of your video, not necessarily the whole thing.
View count matters because strangely enough, research has shown that 47% of video campaign value actually comes from the first 3 seconds of your video. As a result, even very small amounts of exposure are worth you tracking.
2) 10-Second views
Facebook recently introduced a statistic that, yep, you guessed it, tracks how many people have watched your video past the 10-second mark. If your video comes in at under 10 seconds, the statistic instead reflects how many times viewers tipped past the 97% completion mark.
10-second views are important because, following from the research above, 75% of video campaign value is derived from the first 10 seconds. Knowing how many viewers have reached this point will help you to work out your overall ROI.
3) Watch time
This statistic measures the overall time that your video content has been watched by your audience and allegedly, it was one of the most-requested features for Facebook.
Watch time – known as ‘minutes viewed’ on Facebook and ‘time watched’ on Periscope, is an excellent means of judging the overall success of your video, as it paints a picture of long your combined audience have spent viewing your brand message.
4) Average view duration
Although you could be picking up a couple of 10-second views, that statistic is devalued unless you know the sort of engagement that your video content is getting overall.
By tracking average view duration, you’ll be able to compare it to your other videos and work out what sort of content is most appealing to your audience.
5) Audience retention
Represented as a graph on Facebook, audience retention is how well your audience is retained throughout your video. Sudden drops in the graph are representative of the points in your video where you start to lose viewers.
This is an important video metric because, if there’s a sudden point where you start to shed viewers, you’ll know that it’s a turn in the content that people don’t like. With this information in hand, you’ll be able to build more engaging content in the future.
6) Sound on or off?
This metric is particularly important if you’re delivering your message via voice communication. If your viewers haven’t clicked on your video to turn the sound on, they’re never going to get the full body of your message. With this statistic, you’ll know how many viewers are listening, as well as watching, your video.
As many as 85% of Facebook’s videos are watched with the sound off, as a part of its autoplay function. This means that un-muting sound on a video is a point of engagement that you need to track.
7) Impressions and video reach
Impressions is a metric that indicates how many times a viewer has been exposed to a post that contains your video – both your own and those shared by others. Reach is simply a statistic denoting how many times your video has been displayed.
Impressions provide an indication of how many times the post is displayed, whereas reach shows the number of people who saw the post. Reach is usually smaller than impressions, as multiple views by one person count towards the same number of impressions, but only add one count to reach.
Reach and impressions matter as metrics because they show how posts containing your video reached an audience. By comparing them to the number of views and 10-second views you’ve received, you’ll be able to develop an idea of how eye-catching your video is.
8) Click-through and conversion rates
Your video could be getting views, but is it actually driving the end result you’re after? Whether it’s traffic to your website or product purchases, this metric will help you to work out the ROI of your social video.
Click-through and conversion rates are key metrics for most marketers, so it’s key that you stay on top of them. With them in hand, you’ll be able to work to continually improve your video quality.
9) Interaction rate
This is a key metric for 360 degree videos, as video views alone aren’t enough of a metric to cover the engagement potential for this type of content.
Interaction rate is covered by measuring how many users engage by moving their mouse and shifting the viewpoint of the video. It can also be measured based on how many mobile users tilt their phones.
Interaction rate is the statistic for measuring the impact 360 video has had on an audience. If you’re thinking about trialling how 360 degree video works compared to other content types, this metric is definitely one to work into your reports.
Conclusion: Review, review, review
If you want to get the most out of marketing, the key is to never stop testing your content and ads. No matter how well they’re performing, there’s always something that you can improve and with these metrics, you’ll be able to form educated opinions on what you’re doing right and what could be done better.
By refining your video content based on real social data, you’ll increase audience engagement, drive action and, inevitably, boost your ROI.