Making sense of online video analytics can be an overwhelming task given the amount of data that video provides us today. In this article we attempt to simplify video analytics by surfacing the most important reporting metrics across common use cases.
- Baseline and general video measurement metrics across all use cases
- Internal use cases and related metrics
- External use cases and related metrics
Baseline online video measurement metrics
Video plays are no longer a valuable measurement metric by themselves as they were in the past. It used to be that you would publish a video and then judge its success based on the number of plays the video received. This old model of thinking may make sense if your goal is purely awareness, but most video is produced to achieve larger actions. With that said, video plays are still a valuable metric in combination with other KPIs. Today the most common baseline metrics used to understand how video is performing can be simplified to 4 key indicators.
- Video Plays: The number of times a video is watched by one or many different viewers.
- Engagement Rates: The amount of the video that is consumed by one or many different viewers usually recorded as a percentage.
- Source of Traffic: The URLs or web addresses where video viewers are coming from to watch the video.
- Viewer Identity: Specifically who watched the video down to the individual video viewer contact information, IP address, organization name.
Today there are video marketing and online learning platforms that bring a whole new set of measurement metrics with interactive and personalized video. Features that enable actionable layers within a video player, such as buttons, forms, links, quizzes, surveys, choose your own adventure, etc. With interactive video a whole new set up KPIs are possible. New types of metrics now available:
- Viewer Clicks: Which interactive elements by name video viewers are clicking on and the number of clicks across all and individual viewers.
- Form Completes: Viewers that have filled out forms within the video player.
- Quiz Data & Surveys: Quiz and survey data collected from video viewers via interactive features.
- Conversion Rates: The amount of video viewers that clicked an interactive element, completed a form, or filled out a quiz or survey — usually recorded as a percentage.
Internal Online Video Use Cases
Internal video can mean a few different things and the definition will change by the organization. When video is deployed at enterprises or large organizations its typically video shared with employees, customers, partners for training, collaboration and compliance. Massive companies will use live video streaming for CEO town halls and internal broadcasts as a way to reduce communication costs and centralize employee messaging and engagement.
The most common metrics used for tracking video internally can be broken into 4 key measurement points:
- Video Plays: Tracking the number of video plays across all video content or specific videos can tell you how engaged employees are with your content overall or specific videos. This will give you a basic understand if the video is reaching its intended audience.
- Engagement Rates: Tracking the percentage of employees that watch a video or livestream/town hall can give you an employee engagement rate with specific event or training initiative. It’s important to track individual video viewers and specific employees.
- Conversion Rates: Tracking the percentage of employees that complete interactive surveys and quizzes or click on annotations is powerful for understanding deeper engagement and meeting education and certification goals.
- Content Shares: Tracking video content sharing can be incredibly important in understanding how videos are perceived by employees. Videos that are share a lot or often are generally more valuable.
Internal online video is positively impacting your business’s bottom line:
- If training and engagement sessions are being migrated from on-premise to remote and are live streamed then travel expenses and time can be saved.
- Online and live video provides a quick time-to-market with information and training content
- Online interactive video educates and with successful quiz completion can quickly certify employees and highlight those that aren’t compliant in real-time.
Considering creating these reports to help measure your internal video success:
- Video Viewership Across The Organization
Answers: Are people watching videos? - Video Engagement Across all Videos
Answers: Are people consuming the content? - Geographical Viewership Breakdown
Answers: Is everyone from all global offices engaging with content? - Individual Video Viewership
Answers: Who are the top engaged employees or viewers across all videos.
External Online Video Use Cases
External video can mean a lot of things to different types of businesses and organizations but one thing remains certain, external video is designed to reach as many video viewers as possible through video marketing. This can mean video to drive brand awareness, convert leads, retain customers with content such as customer training, support, how-tos and live-streamed events.
External online video marketing, 4 measurement points:
- Video Plays: Which videos are watched by individual viewers or all viewers and the number videos watched per viewer. Meta-data associated with each video such as tags, can tell a story about which products or services are featured in the videos being watched. Knowing who is watching those videos and the products they care about can be powerful. Also consider depending on the product or service you are marketing you may benefit from a video viewership model where you have fewer viewers but they are high value vs high volume and low value.
- Engagement Rates: How are video viewers are engaging with content, how much of the video are they consuming. Down to the individual video viewer level understanding how much of a video or multiple related videos are watched by a specific contact may be telling of where that viewer is in their buying process. For example if they watch three videos related to Product A 80% through they are probably very interested in that product.
- Conversion Rates: How many viewers are completing in-video forms, clicking on interactive elements such as chapters, links, surveys, etc? Do pages with video embedded on them have a higher conversion rate?
- Viewer Identity: To get detailed metrics that can be used to further your video marketing efforts it’s important to make sure all video content is centrally managed – all videos on your website are hosted with an online video platform and connected into the marketing stack. By connecting your videos with your marketing technologies you can open up individual viewer tracking which is crucial for associating video viewership with specific contacts.
External online video marketing is positively impacting your business’s bottom line:
- Centralizing video on your website into a video gallery or resource center will increase the amount of web traffic to the website and boost video SEO.
- Having video on your web pages will increase time on website due to more video viewership
Conversion rates can increase by 2-10x by opening up video as a conversion point using in-video forms - Shorten sales cycles and enable sales and marketing to have more meaningful engagements via video engagement data provided
- Associate revenue with videos watched, including pipeline and closed revenue attributed to video content
- Understand what customers care about such as quality of your content, and the types of video to create.
Considering creating these reports to help measure your video marketing success:
- Video Viewership Across All Web Properties and Social
Answers: Are people Watching Videos? - Video Engagement Across All videos
Answers: Are people consuming the content? - Top Engaged Individual Viewers and Contacts
Answers: Who are my engaged viewers that might be buyers? - Top Converting Videos
Answers: What are my top performing videos? - Top Pipeline Influenced Videos
Answers: Which videos are driving the most pipeline dollars?
