A successful video marketing strategy has several working parts — paying attention to the biggest trends, identifying key opportunities to upsell and making the most of your creative, to name a few. But before you can begin any of these steps, you need to know what your strategy is trying to accomplish — and that insight comes from tracking your video performance.
With so many options to choose from, though, determining the most important video metrics for your campaign can be daunting. And time and energy spent researching cuts into your actual calculations and implementing your plan.
As a key innovator in making videos data-driven, we know how critical it is to capture — and collect — the right information. Here are some of the top performance metrics you can easily add to your list and start tracking, as well as examples of video campaigns that succeeded in each.
So Why Do Video Marketing Metrics Matter?
A whopping 89% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, with 95% of marketers seeing video as an important part of their overall strategy. Clearly, businesses have realized the demand for video in brand communications.
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But while this format excels at making messages engaging, it’s not enough to simply put your message in a video and expect it to work. If you want to know whether your messaging is actually meaningful and resonates with your target audience, you need to collect and analyze the data and then act upon your findings.
Simply put, metrics unlock insight into your audience’s reception of your marketing efforts, helping you make your video marketing strategy smarter.
Among the video engagement metrics available, the following 4 are great to include in your video analytics. Here’s what they mean and what they look like in action.
1. View Count
This important metric is one of the most common, and for good reason. It shows, plain and simple, the number of times your video has been viewed.
View count is sometimes dismissed as a vanity metric because it doesn’t always reflect deeper engagement. Admittedly, there are a few nuances you should be aware of.
How much weight you give this metric depends on how you (or the hosting platform) calculates a “view.” For instance, a YouTube video must be watched for at least 30 seconds to count as viewed, but a YouTube Short racks up a view as soon as it is presented to a user. Meanwhile, on TikTok, a view is counted when viewers stick around for at least 5 seconds.
Pro tip: A related metric to look at is play rate, which is the number of plays divided by the total number of people who visited the page that hosted the video. A low play rate might suggest it’s time to optimize your video thumbnail or headline to make it more compelling at first glance.
Why Is View Count a Key Metric?
Measuring your video’s view count is useful if you’ve set a goal for your campaign to drive brand visibility. If you want to increase your chances of qualifying more leads and making more sales, a high view count indicates that you have a large pool of prospects to start with.
What Brand Did It Best?
To celebrate Season 9 and build excitement for Season X, Fortnite sent a personalized recap video to players showing them the top highlights of their gameplay. The videos hit a total view count in the tens of millions, aided in large part by social sharing (essential when it comes to video marketing for video games).
One key part of their success — and especially important for global video campaigns — was making the video available in multiple languages. This was nothing new for Fortnite, which released a Personalized Video in 12 languages way back in Season 6, thanks to automation tools that made it easy.
The takeaway? If a high view count is one video metric you want to see, be sure to empower social media sharing and localize your video for a global audience.
2. Video Completion Rate
This metric measures how many times your video is viewed from start to finish — or at least close to completion. Do your viewers drop off before finishing your video? Or do they watch it until the end?
Related metrics like average view duration and average watch time report the amount of time each viewer typically spends watching your video, while total watch time adds up the viewing minutes from everyone combined.
Why Care About Video Completion Rate in Your Video Marketing?
Video completion rate reflects whether your video is of value to your viewers. A high video completion rate shows that most of your viewers found your video to be interesting or useful. They may have learned something new from your explainer video or enjoyed every minute of their personalized year in review.
On the other hand, a low video completion rate is indicative that your campaign may not be connecting with your customers or failing to capture their attention right away.
To boost these numbers, try breaking the mold to get them excited. Greet them by first name to make for a more engaging experience. Swap generic clips for scenes unique to their story.
It’s all possible when you leverage the right technology — like Next Generation Video.
Unlike traditional videos, Next Gen Video goes beyond just passive content. It can be personalized for each individual viewer, updated in real time with live data and even made interactive.
These features help capture attention and keep viewers watching longer, boosting your video completion rate and overall engagement rates. By making videos dynamic and hyper-personalized, Next Generation Video lets you deliver experiences that truly connect with your audience — and achieve the results you’re looking for.
What Brand Did It Best?
As a sponsor of the Boston Marathon, adidas created a dynamic video campaign that really connected with runners. Each video was personalized with data from that individual’s race, including their start time, where they ranked among others and actual footage of the moment they crossed the finish line.
This campaign gave runners a fun way to look back at how they performed during the marathon. And they could share the video with friends and other fitness fanatics to show off their hard work and big wins.
Viewers loved it. The video campaign told a compelling story that runners actually wanted to watch until the end and drove an astonishing 95% video completion rate.
Translation? Almost everyone who watched it stayed until the end! Now that’s good content.
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate — commonly referred to as CTR — shows how many people have clicked on a specific link or call-to-action (CTA) in comparison to how many times your video has been viewed. It’s a great way to see at a glance if your video was successful in getting your customer to take the next step.
Why Does CTR in Your Video Metrics Matter?
You want your video to send a message. But your audience needs to not just hear it. They also need to understand it. A high CTR indicates your video clearly communicates — and resonates — with your audience. They’ve viewed your video and found it to be valuable. Now, they want to see what else your brand has to offer.
Did you know videos can be interactive? You can make it easy for your audience to take action by adding a CTA right inside the video. This creates a seamless CX as the viewer transitions smoothly from watching the video to visiting your website, sending an email or whatever you want to happen next.
What Brand Did It Best?
When the Financial Times created a data-driven year in review for subscribers, they opted for an Interactive Video. The CTAs were relevant for their audience, and included actions like following a new topic and continuing to their site to keep reading.
This strategy drove customer engagement, proving so effective that the Financial Times did another year-in-review campaign the next year. This time, they added CTAs to let users click through to sign up for the newsletter, take advantage of subscription offers and more.
It’s no surprise that Interactive Video is great at increasing, well, interactivity. It’s in the name! You can put the call-to-action below the video, above the video or elsewhere in your message, but there’s nothing like including a clickable CTA in the middle of the video so the viewer can take action right then.
Here are just some of the results we’ve seen with Interactive Video:
- 4x higher CTR for an in-video CTA vs. the same CTA on a landing page
- 10x more conversions vs. the client’s control group without Interactive Video
At the end of the day, the success of your video isn’t just about views — it’s about getting viewers to click and engage, and that’s exactly what interactive elements do best.
4. Conversion Rate
Your video’s conversion rate is the percentage of viewers who have taken a desired action. This could be anything from downloading content to making a purchase to any other end goal you have in mind.
Why Should You Care About Your Video Conversion Rate?
Conversions are critical to your brand’s bottom line. While metrics like views and engagement show interest, conversion rate reveals whether your video successfully motivates viewers to move further along the customer journey.
Your conversion rate answers the questions: Is your video not just being watched, but actually driving action? Does it encourage your viewer to renew their services, join your loyalty program or try your latest product?
Conversion rates are the true test of how effective your video marketing efforts are at moving your customer through the funnel. Tracking this metric helps you identify what’s working and where you can optimize to boost results even more.
What Brand Did It Best?
Take a look at this video from Entain. To drive customer loyalty, they sent each player a video offering a special reward for a recommended game.
Personalized data featured throughout made each gift feel extra special. And the campaign was deemed a success once all of the numbers were crunched. When it came to conversions, the campaign saw 88% of customers redeem the reward offered in the video.
Start Measuring Your Video Metrics
Whether you’re looking to promote a new product, drive brand awareness or increase customer loyalty, video is the most engaging way to communicate. But to truly grow your metrics — and maximize your return on investment — your video needs to speak not just to your audience as a whole, but to each individual viewer.
Dynamic, data-driven videos do exactly that. But creating high-quality video content traditionally meant months of editing cycles, big budgets and specialized expertise. Luckily, AI has leveled the playing field.
Lucas AI Video Creator can produce compelling videos in minutes. Built for enterprises, he prioritizes security, scale and customization, letting you create all types of videos — from sales videos and promo reels to AI Video Ads — that perfectly reflect your brand’s tone, style and content.
Want to achieve impressive results like 10x higher engagement, 9x uplift in conversion and 3x higher sales? We can help your numbers soar. Schedule a call, and let’s talk.
