There are many ways to measure the performance of your video that go beyond just views. While it’s easy to fixate on that number and rewarding to see it climb, it’s not realistic to expect that you’re going to strike viral video gold every time you hit ‘publish’. Today we’re examining the value of a view and other metrics you should be looking at when determining the success of your video – animated or live action.
Before we explore the various metrics and what they mean, it’s important to establish what success looks like. What are the goals you’re hoping to achieve with your video? Are you at the early awareness stage of marketing your product or service? Perhaps you’re more interested in reaching a specific demographic? Or maybe you’re further down the funnel and are ready to target your prospects with a harder sell that leads to consideration and ultimately, conversion. The goal will determine which metrics are most valuable. Chances are, you’ve established your objectives prior to creating any kind of content, which will help guide you through the analysis phase.
Don’t Snooze on Views
We touched on views at the top of this post and while they’re not the be-all, end-all when it comes to metrics, they also shouldn’t be ignored. View numbers and their value are not cut and dry across platforms as every hosting platform quantifies them differently. This can make it challenging to differentiate success on one platform vs another. For example, Facebook and Instagram count views for any user that consumes 3 seconds of your video, whereas Google and YouTube count views for users that consume at least 30 seconds (or the duration of your video if it’s less than 30 seconds) of your video. If reach is your main objective, you’ll want to pay close attention to these numbers and weigh their worth on the platforms you stream on.
To add another layer of complexity, it’s important to distinguish between unique views and total views. Both are valuable but mean different things:
- Unique views indicate the number of individuals that are watching your video.
- Total views indicates the sum of all video views.
If you’re finding that your total views are higher than your unique views, that means that viewers are re-watching your content. Depending on the platform that’s hosting your content, you may even be able to drill down and see which IP addresses or individuals are consuming your content which allows you to invest in the people that are further down your funnel.
Here For A Good Time (Not a Long Time)?
Beyond views, it’s important to pay attention to retention rates and viewer engagement. Certain platforms, like Wistia, allow you to view a heat map of viewer engagement, among other metrics. Heat map patterns are helpful in determining when and potentially why, your viewers are disengaging. It also allows you to identify quality viewers – those that you retain for the duration of your video. If awareness, consideration or conversion are among your goals, it’s vital to identify quality viewers vs the quantity of viewers.
Remember, it doesn’t matter how amazing your video is; not everyone that starts it will finish it and that’s okay! Knowing some of the general trends regarding video length and viewership will help you with the framework of your video and placement of your call to action during the creation phase.
But Can You Convert?
And finally, tracking the ultimate metric: conversions! Whether you’re trying to gain more subscribers, increase sign-ups or generate sales, attributing these conversions to your video content is important for measuring ROI.
Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads offer conversion tracking and with platforms like Wistia integrating seamlessly with your Google Analytics account, it simplifies the process.
As far as increasing conversions themselves – let’s face it, who doesn’t want that? – we wrote about using video to boost conversions earlier this year.
We’re Here To Help
If all of this sounds great but is more than you’re willing or able to manage internally, allow Switch Video to provide hosting and analysis through Wistia for the year following delivery of your explainer video. It’s an added service we offer our clients so that they not only have a beautiful video but an understanding of valuable metrics that make sense. Connect with us to learn more about how we can help measure your next animated video.
