Video KPIs & Top Ways to Analyze Your Video’s Performance

Whether you’re new to video marketing or you’ve been doing it for a few years now, chances are some questions still linger as to what the best options are when it comes to analyzing your video’s performance metrics. Some say, “just count the video views, that will tell you whether your video is good or not.” Others say, “just monitor how many comments you get, that will tell you whether your video is good or not.” But what if the video got 10K views and no comments? Is it still good?

Measuring key performance indicators associated with your video content is a vital step of the marketing and analysis process. Not only do you need to know who is watching the video and when, but also what they think about it and why.

The only want to truly know whether your video is performing the way you intended it to, or better yet, the way you NEED it to, is with a clearly defined set of key performance indicators.

Let’s take a look at some of the top video content KPIs and what you can do to ensure the KPIs for your video content are accurate.

Top Video Content KPIs

First, let’s consider the potential key performance indicators that will mean the most to you as you post and share video content. Chances are, things like views will matter, but only under certain circumstances.

Therefore it’s important that not only do you outline the appropriate KPI for video content that makes sense to your needs but also that will prove to you whether your video is truly successful, or not.

Some of the most common KPIs for video include:

• Views
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• Play rate & Replays
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• Shares
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• Video Impressions
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• Engagement
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• Likes or Dislikes
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• Comments
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• Watch Time or Bounce Rate
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• Click-Through-Rate
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• Traffic Source (Organic or not?)
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• Actions After Viewing

Video Awareness

The level of awareness that your video brings toward your key subject is an important element to monitor when analyzing your video’s performance metrics.

These video content KPIs revolve around the total number of people being made aware of your content or your brand and what your video has to offer. Stronger video awareness will generally equate to a more successful video.

Awareness related metrics include:

• Views
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• Plays
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• Replays
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• Social shares
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• Total impressions

Views

Views can be tallied in different ways based on where the video is hosted or watched. If you’re sharing the video on your own website, maybe you would consider a view as “any time the play button was clicked,” or “any time at least 20 seconds of the video played.”

Various social platforms consider a view based on different lengths of time as follows:

• Facebook considers a view to be any video that is watched for 3 seconds or more.
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• Instagram considers a view to be any video that is watched for 3 seconds or more.
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• Youtube considers a view to be any video that is watched for 30 seconds or more.

With such widely variable considerations as to what a “view” is, this metric may not be ideal when determining video performance. And, unless your message and CTA are delivered in 3 seconds, views mean very little in Facebook and Instagram.

Play Rate & Replay

The play rate is the number of times that your video is played. This may be played in full, or played just for a split second. Certain platforms, such as Facebook call this metric “Clicked-to-play” while others may refer to it in a different manner.

Anytime your video play button is clicked this number goes up one. Even video replays are considered here in the “play rate” factor so it’s important to realize this figure could mean a few things:

• That viewers like your video and want to see it again.
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• That viewers are confused by your video and need to see it again.
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• Neither of the two, the button was just clicked for another reason.

Play rate alone is not a valuable metric, but when monitored alongside other video content KPI metrics the video play rate can give some insight into the value or success of your video.

Shares

Videos are shared generally for 1 of 2 reasons. 1) The viewer loved it and wants others to see it. Or 2) The viewer thought it was absurd and what’s to share your mishap with the world.

The majority of the time, a video is shared because the viewer really liked the video or the message delivered within the video.

More video shares also lead to more views and a higher reach. Therefore, video shares are a video content KPI that you really do want to monitor closely.

Not getting enough shares? Try asking! Sometimes simply asking viewers to share a video is enough to generate that boost you’re looking for!

Video Impressions

The number of impressions for your video signifies the total number of times your video content is displayed in front of an audience.

This includes anytime a video thumbnail image with play button shows up on someone’s Facebook feed and is scrolled past. 

It also includes the number of times your video appears auto-playing in someone’s social feed as well as the number of times your video appears in your website search results and essentially any time that your video shows on the screen in front of the interested eyes of the potential audience.

Video impressions are a good KPI to compare against various other KPIs such as the number of shares comparative to the total number of video impressions or the number of likes comparative to the number of impressions. Think of impressions as your total and everything else becomes a percentage of the total.

A video with no impressions may be posted in the wrong location or may use the wrong SEO data such as the video title and description. These are good starting points to check into if your impressions are very low or zero.

Video Engagement

How viewers engage with your video content is also an important metric to analyze when reviewing video performance. Engagement metrics tell if your viewers are actively interested in your video or if they are taking more of a passive approach.

You want viewers to interact with your video as a lack of engagement could mean they are ignoring what you have to say and they may not be hearing the key message.

The following metrics are relative to video engagement:

• Likes or dislikes
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• Comments
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• Watch time
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• Bounce rate

Likes or Dislikes

If you want people to share your video and to follow the instructions provided in your CTA, they’re going to have to like it. Likes are one of many video KPIs that you should be paying attention to but not placing too much weight on. Dislikes are difficult to decipher.

They could mean that the viewer didn’t like the content of the video or simply that they disagree with the topic.

Because likes and dislikes really don’t provide the full picture, these KPIs add very little value to the video performance report unless they are accompanied with other pertinent details that make the full-picture visible.

Comments

Do viewers comment on your videos when you share them on social media? Comments are a metric that you most certainly want to monitor for several reasons:

• Comments offer feedback that can help you decipher whether your video content and the message you deliver within the video is well received – or not.
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• Comments help you to know what your community is interested in and what you can do to deliver a message that speaks to them. Listen to what your viewers have to say!

Watch Time or Bounce Rate

The amount of time viewers spend watching your video is a key video KPI that you should be monitoring closely.

If they aren’t watching much, they could be missing the message and the CTA. Although watch time alone is not sufficient to determine the total effectiveness of your video, it’s a starting point that will tell you whether people are engaging or not.

High bounce rate means you’re video is not connecting with your audience and something needs to change.

Additionally, some platforms, such as YouTube, will rank your video higher if it has a longer watch time than other videos on the same or a similar topic.

A video that tells a powerful story and keeps the viewer around is certainly more valuable and has the potential to be more successful than one that loses the viewer’s interest right away.

Conversion Metrics

Ultimately, we monitor video KPIs with the goal of conversions. What is it that you intend for viewers to do after they watch your video? If they do whatever it is you intend for them to do following your video then a conversion has been achieved and, in that instance, the video was a success.

Conversion metrics can be measured in various ways including:

• CTR
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• Traffic Sources
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• Actions After Viewing

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

The click through rate is the number of times viewers had enough interest in your content to click on the CTA you delivered and follow through to the next step. The higher the CTR the greater the chance you have in converting your viewer into a customer.

If your video has a low click-through-rate, consider how you can use details from various other video content KPI metrics such as the watch time or the comments to determine why viewers are not clicking through.

The idea here is to use each of the KPIs to your advantage to improve your video and make the most out of your content.

If you see viewers are watching your video through, and doing everything BUT click on the CTA, perhaps your content is fine and just your CTA is poor? Now is the time to monitor all of your metrics to come to a conclusion as to what might be going wrong with your content so that you know where to start looking in terms of fixing it.

Traffic Source (Organic or not?)

Measuring and monitoring the traffic source seems like something we all would do, but there’s more to measuring traffic sources than just taking a look to see what percentage of traffic comes from your website and what is coming from YouTube.

Consider the ways that you can use details regarding the exact traffic sources for your video content to your advantage, such as:

• Actively working to optimize your videos based on the traffic sources and the styles of searches that your content is appearing in.
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• Actively working to include more video content in places where your current video content seems to perform best.

After all, focusing all your video content efforts on Twitter, when your traffic all comes from YouTube doesn’t make much sense does it?

Actions After Viewing

The actions that your viewers take after they watch your video may actually be the most important video KPI you monitor.

Why? Because you work so hard on the video and the call-to-action that you deliver in the video, if you find that viewers are not following your CTA, your video is simply not as successful as you want it to be. Period!

The actions that the viewer takes upon seeing or hearing your CTA should be directly relative to the instructions provided in the CTA.

Did you ask them to call a certain phone number? Measure the calls to that number (and make sure that you use that number ONLY for your video to ensure a granular approach to monitoring calls). Did you ask users to click your CTA to be brought to a landing page? Monitor the clicks and, if there are none, your video is not working!

Sometimes the easiest video content KPI to measure is the one that is right under your nose!