According to HubSpot, 88% of companies surveyed have a dedicated team for creating video content. With so many types of content marketing available, video marketing is a powerhouse for engaging your audience. Social media platforms focusing on video content, such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, collectively have more than five billion monthly active users (MUAs). At Slice Creates, we leverage video marketing as one of the best ways to help businesses reach their target audience. We’ve worked with companies of all sizes, industries, and budgets to get brand messaging out there for the consumers who need to see it.
But when tracking your video marketing efforts, which key performance indicators (KPIs) should you monitor? Here are 15 essential video content marketing KPIs that will help your business stand out from the crowd.
Determining the Right KPIs Depends on Your Marketing Goal
To have a successful video marketing campaign, start with outlining your specific video content goals. For example, Slice Creates put together a services marketing social media video for a health brand using footage of real people undergoing a fitness challenge to get their targeted audience interested in tools for a healthy lifestyle.
To identify your goals, focus on the stage of the marketing funnel you want to improve. Maybe you want to gain more leads in the awareness stage or help customers feel more comfortable in the decision stage so they make a purchase. In this case, an influencer showing how to use your product on Instagram might be a place to start.
Once you know which stage to improve, you can plan your content, goals, and video content marketing KPIs around it.
Video Content Marketing KPIs to Track
You’ll want to track some basic video and content marketing KPIs that set the foundation of your video marketing strategy during the awareness campaign. We outline them below.
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times viewers see your video. If someone sees your video eight times, it counts as eight impressions.
However, impressions can differ between social media platforms. For instance, some platforms consider viewing the thumbnail as an impression, while others count it as viewing the first video frame. But since impressions only track who sees the video, not who watches it, this is considered a vanity metric.
Reach
If impressions are simply a volume count, reach is the number of unique persons who have seen your video. This metric helps you know the best time to publish content to obtain a broad reach.
Social shares are ideal for boosting reach. When people talk about a video going viral, they’re talking about how the content gets shared.
We created a series of Instagram stories for Adidas at Slice Creates to generate social buzz inspired by influencer athletes to get sports enthusiast audiences jazzed up about the product. Sharing content is powerful, motivating, and can spread far and wide.
Views
What counts as a video view varies between social media platforms. For example, a video play on YouTube is when someone watches at least 30 seconds of your video. However, on Facebook and Instagram, the threshold is only three seconds.
The view count lets you know if your hook is strong or if people are just scrolling through a feed.
Unique Users
Unique users help you measure the difference between impressions and the number of viewers who watched your video. Sounds like reach, but it’s actually different.
This metric tells us when a single user watched your video through other devices. So, for instance, if someone watches your video on their phone and computer, the reach would be two, but the unique users would only be one.
Ad Recall Lift
Ad recall lift is a perception-based metric that identifies if people remember your video ad or brand after some time. The goal is to increase your brand awareness with your video content.
For Publix, Slice Creates produced a mouth-watering video following a baker creating a loaf of bread. Without the use of many words, the brand still powerfully shines through with a memorable logo, and in all likelihood, made many viewers pretty hungry with strong visuals of flour, dough, and freshly baked bread.
Consideration Campaign KPIs
Consideration campaigns strive to get people to think about your business and look for more information about it. These video marketing KPIs help you understand your campaign’s engagement level.
View Through Rate
According to Google, the view-through rate, or VTR, is “the number of completed videos of a skippable ad over the number of initial impressions.”
It measures how many people watched the whole video. Divide the total number of people who watched the video until the end by the total number of views to determine the VTR.
A low VTR equates to low video engagement. This means many people scrolled past or clicked off your video, often because they lost interest. (This is similar to what they call a “bounce rate” from a website, when people click on a site and then quickly “bounce” from the page because it wasn’t what they were looking for.)
Watch Time
Watch time measures how much time viewers spend watching the video. The higher the watch time, the better!
Video Clicks
The click rate tells you if your videos are getting attention. The higher the rate, the better the reach. However, tracking this metric alone is not helping in determining the success of your video.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is how many people clicked on your video but quickly left and didn’t take action. If the bounce rate is high, your messaging needs improvement.
Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of individuals who saw your content and clicked on the call to action (CTA). This is an important metric to see your conversion rate, because you’ll want to compare the CTR to how many sales or leads (or whatever your ultimate goal is) you generated.
Consideration Lifts
Consideration lifts tell you whether your marketing campaign has had the right effect on the audience. You can use the data to alter your video ads if necessary.
Conversion Campaign KPIs
Conversion campaigns get viewers to take a specific action, whether becoming subscribers or clicking on a landing page. Therefore, they are important KPIs to determine video performance.
Leads Generated
Leads generated tell you the number of people interested in your product or service after watching your content. Leads usually click on a CTA of some kind.
Some ways you can track interest include the following:
- Direct messages
- Sending an email
- Booking an appointment
- Giving you a call
Sales
Sales are the number of people who purchased your product or service after watching your video. Although it can take multiple types of videos to create a sale, this is still an important KPI to track.
Purchase Intent Lift
Purchase intent lift is a customer’s willingness to buy your products or services. You can assess their intent using survey questions.
Cost per Acquisition
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the total cost of a customer completing your desired action. It’s a great indicator of how the ad campaign performed and your return on investment (ROI).
Start Tracking Your Video Content Marketing KPIs
Video content is a key piece of digital marketing strategy. And in order to know what is working, you’ll need to track specific video content marketing KPIs that align with your goals to ensure the success of your campaign.
To learn more about how our team can strengthen your video content marketing, give us a shout and start a conversation with our experts at Slice. We are a full-service video production agency full of innovative disruptors creating content that makes consumers sit up and take notice.
