Mar 8, 2018

How to Measure Success in Your Video Marketing Campaign

by Digital Marketing Institute

A successful video marketing campaign is an essential portfolio piece for digital marketers, as well as an effective way to get high-potential leads to engage with your brand and begin their journey through the sales funnel.

With 45% of people watching videos online each and every day, video marketing is quickly becoming a favorite for digital marketing teams around the globe. In this blog, find out how to measure the success of your video marketing efforts, increase engagement and reduce spend.

Understand the KPIs of your video campaign

With a wide variety of digital touchpoints available to digital marketers sharing video content to their target audience, it’s hard to tell what’s working and what’s not by quickly scanning views.

To generate a clear understanding of the effectiveness of your video marketing campaign and recognize the Return on Investment (ROI) generated, digital marketers use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure their efforts. Thanks to analytics and marketing tools used to track KPIs across all digital platforms, it’s never been easier for digital marketers to participate in KPI tracking and video marketing metrics.

Begin with your goal in mind

Well-defined goals are critical for any content marketing strategy, including when you’re developing a video marketing campaign. KPI reporting for video marketing metrics can be a struggle when you’re unfamiliar with the KPI targets you should be hitting and tracking as your campaign unfolds.

Start your video marketing campaign on the right foot by taking the time to consider the end-goals of your campaign. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, or generate more website views? Once you know what goals you want to hit, it’s easier to decide which video KPI metrics you should be tracking.

Ideally, you’ll measure multiple KPIs throughout the duration of your video campaign. The best part? These KPI reporting endeavors can be utilized across a variety of video campaigns, or optimized to streamline campaign creation for content creators.

Example of Video KPIs

Findings from Small BizTrends indicate that by 2019, internet video traffic will make up 80% of all consumer internet traffic. Additionally, YouTube’s mobile video consumption report rises by 100% each year. With numbers like this, it’s hard not to overthink what metrics and KPIs you should be tracking during your video marketing campaign.

If you’re curious how to successfully measure success in your video marketing campaign, use these key performance indicator examples from Skeleton Productions to discover how other digital marketers are measuring their success and implement your own KPI tracking:

1. The Engagement of Each Video

The video engagement metric demonstrates exactly how long a viewer stayed tuned to your video. Often, this metric is measured as a percentage of the video. For digital marketers looking to dive deep, you can also access the average engagement of the video, which shows how much of a specific video the sum of viewers watched on average.

But what makes engagement so useful for a successful KPI analysis? Well, it depends on the type of video you’re sharing, and how it flows. If you’ve developed an informative video that highlights multiple points on how your product or service is a viable solution to a problem, it won’t matter too much how long viewers are engaged for, as they are getting at least some of the intended information.

However, if you’re developing a narrative-based video with a call to action (CTA) at the end, it’s integral that viewers watch your video all the way to the end to increase conversion rates.

Curata ranks the three most effective video types as:

  • Customer testimonials – 51%
  • Tutorial videos – 50%
  • Demonstration videos – 49%

Keep these statistics in mind when you’re developing your video marketing campaign. Depending on the type of video you choose to create, the more likely a user will stick around until the end of the video.

2. Rate of Play

Before a viewer can watch your video through to the end, they need to click on your video in the first place. To better understand how many people are engaging with your video content, the rate of play is an important metric to track.


Factors that impact the play rate of your video include everything from the thumbnail you choose to its original location on your social media feeds or website. You can see if you’ve reached your KPI targets and initial video goals by measuring the rate of video play, and changing seemingly simple characteristics of the video to increase total views.

3. View Count

View count may seem like an easy metric to measure, but it’s also one of the most important. In short, the total view count of your video demonstrates how many times viewers have watched your video.

However, this metric is tricky, as different video playing platforms measure the view count of videos differently. On Facebook, it only takes 3 seconds of viewing to count as a complete “view,” while it’s an entire 30 seconds of playtime on YouTube.

4. Click-Through

Depending on the final goals of a specific video marketing campaign, the click-through rate is a critical metric to track, especially if your video includes a CTA. Ideally, your video will persuade a viewer to take some sort of action.

If your goal is to increase website views or get customers to click-through to a high-value landing page, it’s important that your click-through rate is high. Match your video content to the CTA to increase your click-through rate.

5. Sharing on Social Media Channels

Any high-quality content marketing strategy you develop will probably include the tracking of social media shares, and this should be no different for your video marketing campaign. Social sharing demonstrates how many shares your video content is getting from viewers.

Depending on who is sharing your video, a high rate of social sharing means that your video is working to increase brand awareness while being of some sort of value to viewers. Chances are, when one viewer from your target audience shares your video across their social media channels, other viewers from the same audience will be introduced to your brand and messaging.

6. Video Conversion Rates

Last, but certainly not least, the conversion rate of your video demonstrates how many leads, prospects, or customers were generated from your video content or video marketing campaign. However, because KPI analysis of this metric may be tough, digital marketing teams may need to get professional help from a KPI measurement and analysis expert.

If your video marketing campaign goal is to get viewers to become actively engaged in your online sales funnel, it’s critical that you track the conversion rates of your video marketing campaign.

Reaching KPI targets is made easy when you have a solid plan developed before your video marketing campaign content is even created. Social media algorithms and search engine rankings are in near constant change, so adapting your video marketing campaign strategies to meet the current digital landscape will require looking back on the KPI reporting results from previous campaigns.

Level-Up your video marketing campaign

The best video marketing campaigns are those that help you reach a business goal and drive positive results. Now that you’re familiar with the key performance indicator examples that can be tracked and measured to optimize the success of your video marketing campaign, browse the following video marketing strategies to take your content to the next level:

  • Find a thumbnail image that is relevant to your target audience or that resonates with a wide range of individuals.
  • According to Social Media Today, people spend three times longer viewing live videos on social media as compared to pre-recorded videos. Keep your audience engaged for longer by utilizing the live video capabilities of social networks.
  • Can’t think of a video to make? Consider upcycling blog content into an educational video.

Whether your video content will be displayed on social networks or kept on your website in the form of an informative customer experience testimonial, video marketing campaigns are part of a powerful content marketing strategy to move your business forward. Strive for high-quality video content, placed at various touchpoints throughout your sales funnel to maximize engagement and increase your conversation rates. Utilizing video marketing metrics as a modern digital marketer will set you apart from the competition and solidify your place as an in-demand professional.

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