Marketers, Move Past Vanity Video Metrics To Reach Your Business Goals

Numbers don’t lie. But they can fool you into believing you are driving business results when in reality you need more actionable data points.

In a study by the CMO Council, only 23 percent of marketing leaders stated their organization does “extremely well” or “quite well” in measuring and communicating the business value and financial contributions resulting from their campaigns and investments.

Let's start with one of the biggest vanity metrics:

Total Views

Much like page visits, total views isn’t indicative of hitting any goals you set out with. Who's watching is equally if not more important than the number of people watching. And if everyone leaves your video content a few seconds in, you aren’t hitting any business goals.

Furthermore, depending on if you’re advertising with video on Facebook can charge you by impressions. When setting up a campaign, specify to Facebook you’ll pay each time someone watches at least 10 seconds of your video.

If you use Wipster's Pulse feature, you can also view the full aggregated metrics across all your social media channels, including views, duration, and engagement, making it simple to have an overall indicator that can inform you of the ongoing success of your videos.

Conversion Rate

While this applies to your overall marketing strategies, it’s still important as you integrate video into your campaigns. Stay with me here-conversions are still important. The total number of leads and your conversion rate can be skewed by the amount of unqualified traffic you’re bringing in.

So how can video marketers drill down to what matters?

First and foremost, marketing goals need to align with business goals. Then you can clearly define success whether it’s a combination of converting leads, building your list, increasing awareness or improving your return on ad spend.

Once you have goals in place, here are a few ideas to help you get better metrics.

Your Email Performance Metrics for Video

Test out an opt-in gate for your lower funnel video content to build your email list. You can also use a video player like Brightcove or Wistia to can find out who is watching based on clickthrough from emails. Combine this with your marketing automation platform of choice and you can determine what content appeals most to your target personas. When you are looking to create the most relevant content possible for your different segments, this data is essential.

For qualifying leads you can gauge their engagement by reviewing:

• Playthrough rate. First of all, did they open the email containing a video? If so, how much of that video did they watch?
• Shares. Did they find your content valuable enough to share it?
• Additional Actions. After watching content, what other sections of your site did they view? What other steps did they take?  

Tracking Onsite Content

If a video is on your website, you should also be looking at site metrics like bounce rate and time spent on page comparing how adding video impacted each. You can also review the playthrough rates and amount of time users spend per session when placed on different parts of your website.

As you probably know, ad fatigue is a very real thing. AdEspresso looked at over 500 campaigns and found CPC increased sharply after the same ad was served four times. The clickthrough rates also clearly gradually declined.

But not only do you need to mix up the creative to help fight against continually increasing CPC costs, you can also look at your relevance score. Positive indicators to help your score include video views, link clicks, conversions, and other intended actions. The higher the score, the cheaper it costs to serve ads, helping increase your profit margins.

Ultimately the metrics you should be tracking will go back to your business goals and where the video is being served within your marketing funnel. At the awareness stage, Wipster’s HealthScores provides a top-level view of your video performance aggregated from multiple video channels.

Since most social videos are to build awareness and audiences, you can see in real time whether specific content resonates with your followers or cold traffic.