Video is now widely used online for a variety of purposes such as product demonstrations, company announcements, webinars, explainer videos, and much more. As video has become such a core component of online strategies, it’s important for businesses to understand exactly how to measure their success. After all, there’s no good dedicating a significant amount of time and resources to creating video content if you have no idea whether it’s paying off.
To help you out, Zidivo has shared some of the most valuable ways to measure video performance and advise professionals on how to use these results to educate future strategies.
Let’s start with the most obvious way to measure video success, view count. While views are important for seeing how many people your videos have reached, it’s a vanity metric unless compared with other aspects of video like engagement and viewer retention. To elaborate, having a high number of viewers is pointless if no one engages or clicks-through to what your video is directly or indirectly pushing. Sharing your videos on the right platforms is the best way to make sure your viewers are comprised of people that are likely to be interested in what you have to say, not just every man and his dog. The amount of engagement your video receives should correlate with your view count to show if you are marketing your videos in the right ways.
The Zidivo platform allows businesses or individuals to implement any scale of video campaign and easily monitor their success in real-time using a range of important metrics. Users can create their own web-pages for hosting a live or on-demand video and completely customise their HTML5 players to represent their brand.
Another metric that helps with how to measure video ROI is viewer retention, otherwise known as your viewers’ attention span. By analysing how long people tend to watch your videos for and noting when viewers drop off, professionals can use the viewing time of each video to pinpoint which types of video are a hit and which don’t go down as well.
Some video topics and purposes lend themselves to being a particular length. For example, if your brand plans to offer a series of webinars, longer live streams are advisable so viewers can engage and ask questions in real-time. On the other hand, if your business wants to explain what they do or demonstrate a product, a short explainer video would be ideal. Viewer retention is a great way to measure whether you’re getting your video durations right and to educate future videos.
Video engagement is another key metric, showing that people are enjoying or paying attention to your video(s) enough for them to engage in some way. Whether a viewer clicks through to your site or other videos, makes a comment, or makes a direct purchase, there are many ways to effectively measure engagement.
When deciding how to measure video ROI, your success should be determined by your original goals. Each video should have its own unique and specific aims, making it easy to measure the types of engagement and see how successful your content has been. For example, if your video aims to build an audience, you should look at how many viewers move on to watch a number of your other videos and how many click straight off without showing interest.
While the content of your on-demand and live videos is what’s really important, there are a number of metrics that help businesses to understand where they’re going wrong in the promotion of their videos. One of these is video click-through rate - a metric that essentially shows how effective your video’s title, thumbnail, description, Call To Action and more are. To work this out, divide the number of views by the number of clicks. You can use the number of clicks to pinpoint how best to spark interest and grab the attention of your target audience.
There are many online tools out there these days that allow businesses to easily track where their leads are coming from. Make the most of these so you can give your video strategy the credit it deserves and find out which types of video content generate the warmest or most valuable leads.
Broadly speaking, your return on investment can encompass all the above metrics. A video may not result in a huge boost in revenue, but instead, it might generate tons of brand awareness and positive engagement. If you want to just focus on profits though, calculating a specific ROI involves considering all the costs involved in the video creation process, such as equipment, production, time, and more. Minus your costs from your earnings to determine the overall success of each video.
Zidivo offers a range of features allowing users to implement extensive video campaigns. The platform can be used to host on-demand videos or share lengthy live streams, where users can clearly measure how effective each video is. Whether you are a marketing agency looking to manage all yours or your clients’ video marketing in one place, or you are an individual planning to try their hand at live-streaming - the platform is designed to suit a wide range of users.
It doesn’t matter what size of business you have, from solopreneur marketing professional to a huge corporate; there’s a way for you to get started with video marketing straight away. And you don’t need a big budget, though if you have one, of course, you can well and truly run with this. Many people simply start off filming with their mobile phone and then update their equipment and their budget for advertising as they grow. But whichever way you do it, it’s important that you start.
The reality is that a well scripted and produced video actually requires an enormous amount of work! Despite the fact videos may last less than a minute, they can take months to get right if you're new to video production. Not every business has the budget to bring in experienced professionals, so if you are considering writing your own video script, we've got some top tips to help you get the right results, as well as a handy step-by-step guide that ensures you don't miss anything out.
