So you’ve published your new video. That’s great. But, before you get to celebrate your success, it is important to know how to measure success. That is where video metrics come in. With the use of software, you can analyze your videos and automatically detect patterns of behavior, attributes, and monitor the video. Ideally, you should know this before you publish your video. But, as long as you understand it, it is all for the better.
Read on and find out all that you need to know about video analytics, including how to use them to ensure your videos achieve the success that your business or marketing plans are aiming for.
KPIs refer to Key Performance Indicators that allow you to track the activity on your videos. Video KPIs are easy to track and align well with marketing targets. Let’s take a look at a few of them and highlight their importance.
Watch Time
This is one of the most important KPIs to track. Though counting views is an important metric, it doesn’t give you the information needed to make improvements. One can have thousands of views, but if the watch time doesn’t reflect the length of the video, then you know that the viewers aren’t engaging with the content.
Click-through Rate
This helps marketers better understand customer behavior. The higher the CTR, the more engaged is your audience. When people are watching the video, they don’t want to be interrupted by clicking off to another site. This shows that the video resonates with the audience.
Engagement
This shows whether or not people find your content engaging and interactive. Everything from likes to shares to comments is a part of the engagement metric. It is a more qualitative metric that helps you gauge the video’s impact on the audience.
View-to-Engagement Ratio
This determines the quality or the relevance of the video. When users comments or likes after watching a video, the algorithms rank the video higher.
Subscriber Growth
An increase in subscribers can lead to growth across the board for different videos. It also leads to increased interaction – views, likes, comments, and watch-time.
Average View Duration
This is one of the most important video metrics as it can give you valuable feedback on your video’s performance. It allows you to focus on the part of the video that leads to a drop-off and make the necessary changes.
Tools to measure video KPIs
There are various software and online tools that analyze metrics to track video performance. Every video marketer needs to optimize the content to increase the video marketing strategy and thus engagement and conversation.
Although most marketing platforms provide analytics, there are some tools that help you to delve deep and reach your audience effectively. These are as follows:
VidIQ
This tool helps marketers to identify which title to choose, what should go in the description, what the tags and the keywords should look like. Furthermore, it enables you to get an insight of your competitor’s performance and leverage on what’s trending in your category. One can easily go about measuring engagement for your videos through various easy-to-track metrics. It is a great tool for individual publishers or digital marketing agencies.
Vimeo
Here we have professional software which is easy to use. It offers a variety of detailed analytics and provides insight on who liked, commented, or subscribed after watching your videos. However, it isn’t free and has far less traffic than YouTube.
Wistia
This is another video analytics tool that can help you identify the metrics of your videos. There are various types of actions that can be created such as creating pop-up calls to action, requesting user information before or after the video. Other metrics such as engagement and click-through rates are also easily assessed.
YouTube
There is no introduction needed here. YouTube’s analytics provides all the metrics that you would need in order to have full information about your video’s success (or lack thereof). Its Creative Studio dashboard shows all the basic analytics such as views, subscribers, watch-time, and even video marketing ROI.
Hippo Video
Apart from video hosting, Hippo Video provides solutions for video marketing ROI and tracking performance metrics. With this tool, you can engage viewers and generate leads faster to speed up your sales cycle. Out of all the tools mentioned here, Hippo Video is the easiest to set up and use.
How to improve likes and views?
In order to improve likes and views on your video, it is important to have a high CTR. If CTR is low, the platform will stop recommending your videos. Your aim should be to increase your clicks per impressions in the first 2 days after publication.
Focus on your niche
It is important to have a loyal following to increase your CTR. Having a clear target audience and niche depends on how you build your channel. Focus on one topic and you are bound to get higher CTR. At first, you’ll get fewer views to begin with. But since they are more focused, they will help you to get a better CTR and rank higher. It is the foundation on which your channel will grow.
Research Video Titles and Keywords
In order to get people to click on your video, you need to have a title that contains the terms people are already searching for. One tool that is quite helpful for such video performance metrics is Ubersuggest. This tool will give you keyword ideas and top-ranking terms once you type in a working title. Another tool is TubeBuddy. It gives a score for your title, keywords, and analyses the scores. Ensure that you use terms that have a high search volume.
Structure Titles to Appeal to your Niche Audience
You need to improve the chances that people searching for your niche click on your content. This will allow your YouTube channel to grow. For this, you need to structure video titles that fit closely with search queries. The more specific the title, the more relevant it is for the audience, and the more relevant it is, the more impressions and likes you’ll generate.
If your title is broad, it may get high CTR. But it won’t work well for your content. In this case, the CTR may be damaging since users would want to return to the page and search for some other video that matches their queries. This drives down your retention and watch-time.
Once a video reaches its peak, the platform will promote it to a wider audience. But it shouldn’t be your goal to go for generic topics from the beginning.
Create unique and enticing Thumbnail Images
When publishing videos thumbnail images are just as important as the title. These are perhaps the most powerful tool to catch the viewer’s attention and boost CTR. You must realize that your video isn’t just up against other videos on the same matter. It is also up against every other video on the platform.
More than 90% of high-performing videos on Youtube use custom thumbnails. This is because the default thumbnails end up doing more harm than good. But it also provides a general guide for a thumbnail that will improve CTR. It suggests including the presenter, text, and emotional expression.
Where to promote these videos?
If you want to promote your videos and reach a wider audience, you need to take advantage of social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. Around 80% of internet users are on Facebook. This means that you can reach a wider audience by utilizing social media ads.
Native Publishing
Once you have made your video, it needs to be published. Of all the platforms, Youtube is the largest and offers more opportunities to reach a wider audience group. But simply posting your video on a platform is not enough. You should leverage your video metrics and decide what to do next. You could have paid ads at the end of your high-performing videos, or you can cross-promote your videos.
Optimize your Content
Every social media platform is unique. Therefore, you need to optimize your content for the platform you are going to publish it on. More and more people watch videos on mobile. You could, then, optimize your content for mobile formats with square or vertical videos. Also, keep in mind that the stories you share on social media are different from the traditional stories we tell in business. The stories need to be dynamic and interesting from start to finish.
Also, if the title of your video is catchy enough to stoke the curiosity of the viewers, it is the call to action at the end that closes the deal. Therefore, ensure that you have a call to action to lure the audience to do what you want them to.
Common FAQs to improve the conversion rate
How to monitor online videos?
You can monitor your online videos via Video Metrics. There are many software and tools available such as Youtube Analytics and TubeMogul. These tools allow you to keep an eye on where the audience is coming from. They also highlight which parts of your videos have gone viral, and which country your video is most popular in.
There are various other tools and video sharing sites, which offer similar functions. However, they require a subscription and do not get much traffic. Another free tool that you can use to increase your conversion rate is Google Analytics. It highlights the number of viewers that have visited your website after watching your video.
What metrics to use for video analysis?
The metrics that each software and tool measures can vary greatly. But there are five basic metrics that you should be measuring for every video. The first of them is view count. It is quite basic and shows how many people have clicked on your video. The second metric is the watch rate. This metric determines the relevance of the video.
The third metric is engagement. This highlights data such as how long the viewers are watching your videos and trends regarding drop-offs. The fourth metric is social sharing and comments. It is a good indicator of how excited the audience is about your video. The fifth metric is conversion rate. This highlights the ultimate goal of your video – following the call to action.
Which are the tools available online for video analysis?
There are various tools that offer video analytics. Some of them are as follows:
- Talkwalker
- Vimeo
- Vidyard
- Vidooly
- ViralStat
- Vidalytics
- Cincopa
- Wistia
Which one to use to improve the performance of a video?
Each tool is different even though many of them have overlapping features. These are used by marketing teams, support teams, and HR teams. In order to improve the performance, you need to use these tools to increase your conversion rate. This can be done by posting a high-performing video on the landing page. This is a trend amongst marketing teams that has reaped them great profits. Videos are the best way to tell a story and to help digest more information within a few seconds or minutes.
Conclusion
Video Metrics have thoroughly changed the way people create and publish their videos. Not only do they give you the basic idea of how well your video is doing, but they also help you fix any problems that might be keeping viewers from your videos.
Most of the metrics mentioned in this article should give you all the information you will ever need to make truly inspiring videos. There are various video metric tools that you can use to this effect. Remember that as the competition gets fierce, so your videos too need to become more sophisticated. Utilize these metrics and know how well your videos are doing. If they are doing well, keep up the good work. If not, analyze where the drop-offs are, assess the trends, and fix the problem.
