How to understand your video metrics better so you can grow your audience on various social media channels, your website, and beyond.
Introduction
In today’s digital landscape, video content reigns supreme, captivating audiences across platforms and driving engagement like never before. A recent study by Wyzowl found that as many as 91% of consumers want to see more online video content. However, creating compelling videos is only half the battle. Understanding how viewers interact with your content is equally crucial.
This is where video analytics and metrics come into play. By diving into the data behind your videos, you can unlock valuable insights into viewer behavior, preferences, and engagement levels.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the intricacies of video analytics and the key metrics to track, empowering you to optimize your video content strategy and maximize its impact on your audience.
What is Video Analytics, and How to Use It to Track Video Metrics?
Video analytics provides valuable insights into video content performance, audience engagement, and effectiveness. It provides such insights by collecting, measuring, and analyzing data related to the performance of a video campaign.
Using a data-driven approach, marketers can optimize their strategies for better engagement and conversions, and ultimately, enhance their return on investment (ROI).
Main Video Metrics to Measure
When it comes to measuring the success of your video content, there are several key metrics you should pay attention to. Exploring the following metrics will help you understand how well your content resonates with your audience, identify areas for improvements, and make data-backed decisions to optimize your video marketing efforts.
1. View Count
This is one of the easiest ways you can measure the interest of a video. It looks at the number of views and the higher, the better. If a particular topic gets lots of views, you can safely assume the topic is of huge interest to your audience.
Additionally, it might highlight other factors that are contributing to the number of views. For example, it might be because of the title or the channel in which you promoted it.
One important thing to remember is that the view count only indicates people who have started watching the videos. The next metric will provide this information.
2. Watch Time
This metric measures the total amount of time people spend watching your video. If the watch time is high, the platform where you host your videos assumes that it’s engaging and pushes it to more of your audience.
3. Social Sharing
The number of times your video is shared across social media platforms indicates shareability and potential for virality. An audience that finds your videos valuable will share them with friends and colleagues across various social media channels.
4. Click-through Rate
The click-through rate is an expression of the percentage of people who clicked on your video’s link or CTA button. They are an important metric because they indicate whether the videos are inspiring the desired actions from the audience.
Keran Smith, Co-Founder and CMO at LYFE Marketing, says, “One effective tip for improving click-through rates (CTR) for videos is to create compelling and intriguing thumbnails. Thumbnails are the first thing viewers see when browsing videos, so they play a crucial role in attracting clicks. Use bright colors, high contrast, and clear images to make your thumbnails stand out among others in the search results or recommended videos.”
5. Conversion Rate
Conversions show how many people turned into leads or customers after watching your video. It is often expressed as a percentage (out of all viewers) and is a useful metric if you want to understand your videos’ impact on the company’s bottom line. For marketers, it helps them check whether the money they’re spending on videos is driving revenue for the company.
This metric is particularly significant for app development companies, as it directly correlates with the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in attracting new clients or users.
6. Engagement
Engagement is an important metric and also one of the broadest you’ll find yourself tracking. It can be tracked quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, you can look at the number of likes on your video or view it as a percentage of how much of your video was watched by all viewers.
Engagement metrics help you understand how people interact with your content. If you dig deeper, you’ll better understand what you can do to keep them hooked for longer and enable a more positive brand experience.
7. Audience Retention
Audience retention shows you which parts of your videos people find interesting and where they typically drop off.
The reason behind your video for sales is to make sure your viewers go further into the sales funnel. Ideally, you want them to watch the entire video, click on the CTA, perform the action you want them to do, and engage with them to finally transform them into a paying customer.
You can guess the kind of interest a viewer has in what you offer based on the time they spend watching a video.
8. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate tells you whether a viewer left your web page without looking at your website any further. If the bounce rate is high, it indicates something is wrong, so you need to determine what that is and correct it.
How to Improve Your Video Metrics
Source: Freepik
Understanding the potential of your video content starts with understanding and optimizing your video metrics. It’s time to look at some practical strategies you can adopt to enhance your video performance and engage your audience more effectively.
Tailor Videos to Each Platform
Tailoring videos to each platform is a crucial strategy for improving video metrics. You can implement it in several ways:
- Platform-Specific Customization: Customize your videos for each platform based on its unique requirements. Consider resolution, frame rate, video length, content format, hashtags and keywords, platform-specific features, and audience demographics.
- Analytical Insights: Tailoring video content allows you to gather specific data-driven insights into how your audience interacts with your content on each platform. Analyzing helps you refine your content strategy, understand audience preferences, and optimize future videos for better performance.
- ROI Optimization: Tailoring videos saves valuable time, effort, and resources, ensures your videos resonate with the right audience, and achieves the desired results.
Use Attractive Thumbnails
Attractive video thumbnails play a crucial role in enhancing video metrics. They will increase the click-through rate of your video. When viewers see an enticing thumbnail, they’re more likely to click on your video, directly, impacting its visibility and success.
They also provide a quick insight into your videos content for your audience and set expectations for the viewer, helping them decide whether to watch the video or not.
Add Calls-to-Action
CTAs impact video metrics in several ways:
- View Count: Call-To-Action (CTAs) encourages viewers to take deliberate actions, such as subscribing, liking, or sharing the video.
- Engagement Rate: Use actionable verbs such as “Try now!” or “Sign up today!” in a CTA to drive action.
- Conversion Rate: Relevant CTAs can lead to higher conversion rates. Align CTAs with your video’s message such as “Get Started” for an explainer video.
- Social engagement: Use CTAs that encourage viewers to like, share, and comment on your video as this may boost visibility and expand your audience.
Optimize Videos for SEO
Make sure the video is available for Google and make sure your page isn’t blocked from Google crawl bots. You can do this by double-checking the page is not blocked from crawling by the robots.txt file and that the page’s HTML code doesn’t have a “noindex” meta tag.
Next, optimize your videos for the right keywords as good on-page and off-page optimizations make them visible to search engines and are found for specific search queries. Focusing on one main keyword and a couple of supporting ones ensures your page will appear in search results for multiple keywords and increase traffic. You can use artificial intelligence to get the right keywords in the same way it is used to write cover letters, video scripts, music lyrics, etc.
Create an engaging title and meta description tags that contain your main keyword or a variation of it. To boost click-through rates, make them engaging. Users will decide whether to click on your video based on these so make them interesting enough to encourage more users to click and watch your video.
Google generally operates with text on the page, so you’ll need to add some text to give context to the video.
Work on on-page optimization, including practices such as creating easily understandable URLs that contain a keyword, linking the page containing the video to other pages from your site, optimizing videos for loading speed, and improving the Core Web Vitals of the page.
One of the most important pieces of information you can add to your video is a timestamp. It helps video content SEO because key moments of your video will be displayed on SERP and might improve click-through rates. If you find all of this a bit overwhelming, you can hire an SEO specialist using an HR applicant tracking system.
Leveraging AI SEO optimization is also becoming increasingly popular. AI-powered tools can assist in tasks like keyword research, content optimization, and technical SEO audits, potentially saving time and resources.
Add Subtitles
Adding subtitles and captions to your videos can lead to an increase in views, making them an incredibly powerful tool for boosting engagement.
They are essential because they improve accessibility by making video content available to a wider audience. Language barriers won’t hinder viewers from engaging with your videos. Furthermore, they increase the visibility of your videos on search engine results pages (SERPs), allow viewers to consume video content without sound, and enhance comprehension, attention, and memory of video content.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is a powerful technique that allows you to compare different variations of a webpage, app, or other digital content to determine which one performs better. When it comes to video metrics, A/B testing can significantly enhance your understanding of user behavior and help optimize your videos. It can help improve CTR, bounce rate, video completion rate, video retention rate, video views, and shares.
Wrapping Up
By embracing a data-driven approach and continuously refining your video content strategy, you can cultivate deeper connections with your audience and maximize the impact of your video campaigns.
Remember, each metric offers valuable insights into viewer preferences and behavior, guiding you towards more engaging and impactful video content creation.
Whether you’re a marketer striving for higher conversion rates or a content creator aiming to captivate audiences, the journey to optimizing video metrics is an ongoing process of experimentation, analysis, and refinement.