How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Video Ad Campaigns?

Any video ad campaign is incomplete if the success it has achieved is not measured aptly. Satisfying yourself just with creating an awesome video having all the essentials that could make it a HIT, won’t let you know that you had met your objectives, the goals why the ad campaign was run, and did it bring you the desired returns?

Well, most of the marketers make videos but very few put in conscious efforts and care for measuring the returns.

A study by HubSpot, reveals that 35% of businesses are using intermediate or advanced analytics to measure video performance.

It is of critical importance for marketers to understand the performance of the video ad campaign. They need to have in-depth knowledge of the video metrics, what the numbers mean and how to improve them.

Below I would be focusing on 4 of the most important metrics that should be considered by every marketer who has created a video ad campaign for his online business.

Here we go,

• View Count –

Many marketers take this metric in layman terms and elate on the number received under the tag of ‘Views’. Ironically but these numbers are deceptive and are no way related to the real success of your video.

View count indicates what number of viewers have watched your ad and possibly what is the reach of your video content. It is essential to track views but being an online marketer make a note that across the web these views are treated differently.

For YouTube, a view is counted after 30-secs of video is watched. Facebook considers a mere 3-sec video viewed as a ‘View’. It is highly important that while accumulating data from various channels this fact should be taken into consideration.

A wise TIP to boost your video view count –

Share your video with the targeted audiences across social networks through big social influencers. Also, pay to promote where your audiences can be found.

• Play Rate

Going by the definition, play rate is the percentage of visitors that have clicked to watch the video. As it is a user-initiated action, it is a clear indication that the content, graphics and the place where it was uploaded for being viewed all have worked effective in sync.

The video captured the audience attention and generated interest for viewing further. Content plays the key factor that hugely effect this metric.

A wise TIP to increase your play rate –

Craft an engaging thumbnail. If it didn’t work earlier, change the copy with words that convey the message more accurately.

• Engagement

Now friends this is the metric that is treated as the regulator to find out the effectiveness of the video. You too might have heard this term from the Pros and read 100 odd posts describing why this so essential and N number of ways the value of this metric can be increased in your content and video marketing strategies.

Engagement numbers show to what duration you were able to lure the audiences. Marketers keenly study the Average Engagement Rates received to a video. Considerably if this data is analyzed with graphical representation it shows when the audience started watching the video, when they stopped and when re-watched.

Few wise TIPS to increase your engagement rates –

• Ensure the video content is short, concise & clear.
• Communicate to your audience the way they want. If they want to learn about product usage instead of showing them an advert, show them the How to use the product part.
• Find out what made the users stop watching the video and improve the same.

Engagement is synonymous to every type of video in every niche. As long as you create videos that entice users you would have a decent engagement rate.

• Social Sharing

A very familiar term social sharing indicates how many people shared your content across different social channels. This metric points on that how compelling is the video overall to the target audiences and it being share-worthy how much are the audience in favor of spreading the word about it.

Altogether, more awareness about your business and brand can be achieved along with reaching the target audiences.

A few wise TIPS to increase the social sharing –

• The More you ASK your viewers to share your content the better the impact.
• Create share-worthy content. Choose from educational, emotional or entertaining content forms.
• Take help of influencers relevant to your target audiences.

Key Takeaways for Marketers –

Discussed above were a few of the important metrics, more such can be there depending upon the type of video. Always gauge the effectiveness of your videos. Don’t draw immediate conclusions without understanding the reasons for video being a HIT or Quit.

Measure, Learn, Improve and Re-measure, the path to continuous improvement.