
Video marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses looking to increase brand awareness and generate leads. In fact, research shows that 81% of marketers plan to include video in their marketing strategy in the coming years.
With more companies investing in video marketing, it can be tough to stand out. To succeed, you need to measure every aspect of your campaign and consistently improve as you go. This is where tracking the right video metrics can help you.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to 30 video metrics that can help you understand the performance of your content. We’ve also included tips for improving video metrics.
Bonus: Download our video marketing report to present key video metrics in a single visual document. The report is fully customizable, and you can download it in high-quality PDF, embed it anywhere or share it online with a link.
Video metrics are critical to understanding how consumers engage with your content. They help you analyze the likes and dislikes of your audience, what gets them to watch for longer, what gets them to take action and more.
Better yet, video metrics help you learn from your mistakes, replicate your successes, and experiment with different strategies until you find something that works for you. Consequently, you save valuable time, money and effort by focusing on things that actually bring results.
Ultimately, tracking video analytics is key to optimizing your videos and ensuring you get the most ROI out of them. Let’s look at some key video metrics you need to track.
Pro Tip: Did you know you can track analytics for all projects shared via Visme? Create and share videos made in Visme through a link and track video metrics like views, time spent, average completion, source, location and more directly from inside your dashboard. Learn more about Visme Analytics.
In this section, we’ll look at general video metrics you need to track regardless of the platform or channel you’re using. These are the most important video metrics for any marketer and they provide a basic overview of whether your video is achieving its goal or not.
Engagement is one of the most important — and broadest — video metrics you’ll track for your brand. It shows you how well your video resonated with your audience.
Engagement can be tracked in several ways — both quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, you can track engagement by looking at the number of likes on your video. Or, you can view it as a percentage of how much of your video was watched by all viewers.
When it comes to the qualitative, emotional aspect of engagement, comments can tell you a lot about how your video is affecting the audience. Are they asking questions? Do they find your video controversial? Does it make them feel happy or proud of your brand? Are they interested in your products or services?
Keep track of the engagement on your videos on all platforms to understand how people interact with your content. Also, dig deeper to understand what you can do to keep them hooked for longer and enable them to have a positive experience with your brand.
In video marketing, conversions show how many people turned into leads or customers after watching your video.
The conversion rate is often expressed as a percentage (out of all viewers) and can be useful in understanding your videos’ impact on your company’s bottom line. It’s important for marketers to know if the money they’re spending on videos is driving any revenue for the company.
The conversion rate is mostly used to analyze the performance of video ads. Ads also usually come with CTA buttons, which are easier to track. However, you can always use UTM parameters to track the not-so-direct conversions and leads coming from other posts.
Views are the number of times someone watches your video. This metric is important because it shows how many people are consuming your content.
However, views alone aren't enough to determine whether your video was successful. For example, it’s possible people watched your video but didn’t take the desired action after.
Nevertheless, it’s still important to know the view count because it often directly impacts how various algorithms rank your video and make it more visible. It can also show you how many people actually found your thumbnail or intro appealing enough to stop and consume at least the first few seconds of your video.
The click-through rate is expressed as the percentage of people who clicked on your video’s link or CTA button out of all those who viewed it. Click-throughs are an important part of tracking whether your videos are inspiring the desired actions from the audience.
For example, you may want people to head over to your landing page or pricing page after watching your video. You can see how convincing your video was by tracking the clicks. And then, if they still fail to convert, maybe it’s time to revisit your website copy or design.
The average view duration shows how many minutes of your video people typically watch until they drop off. This is an important video metric as it shows which part of your video gets uninteresting or stops delivering enough value.
The average view duration also shows whether your audience prefers shorter videos or longer ones. Use that information to tailor your video length, such as 15 seconds, 30 seconds or longer than a minute.
In addition to important metrics such as engagement, views and clicks, you should also track some specific video metrics for each channel you’re using. Let’s take a look at these below.
Watching a video on a landing page is different from pausing mid-scroll on social media with auto-play on. The former is more deliberate and intentional, which is why there’s also a high chance of conversion. Keeping that in mind, make sure you’re tracking the following metrics for videos embedded on your website.
As we mentioned above, video consumption on websites and landing pages is more intentional. This is why tracking the play rate for these embedded videos is more important than reach or auto-play views, as it shows action.
The play rate shows how many people actually clicked on Play to watch a video out of all the people who visited that web page. This can show things like whether your video is relevant enough, placed at the optimal position or has an eye-catching thumbnail.
Social shares show the number of people who share your video on social media, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
This metric is important as it shows how interesting your audience finds your content and how willing they are to share it with friends. Videos being shared on social media also means good news for your website traffic.
YouTube is one of the world’s biggest video platforms. Every minute, users stream nearly 700,000 hours of video on the platform. If YouTube is part of your video marketing strategy, make sure you’re tracking the following platform-specific metrics for your content.
This metric tells you how many people subscribed to your channel after watching a YouTube video. Subscribers are key to growing your brand on YouTube. They’re your most loyal audience and are more likely to watch future videos and increase watch time.
That’s why it’s important to know whether your videos are encouraging new visitors to subscribe to your channel or not. Are they interesting enough to keep them wanting more? Do they further your brand’s promise of creating valuable content on YouTube?
Watch time is the total amount of minutes people have spent watching your videos. Tracking this video metric is important because YouTube’s algorithm favors videos with higher watch time and ranks them better in search results. Additionally, it shows how engaging your videos are and whether people like watching them for longer.
Audience retention shows you which parts of your videos people find interesting and where they typically drop off. You can track this video metric in YouTube analytics in the form of a line graph.
You can also compare it with typical retention to see how well a particular video performed versus your other videos. Use this information to perfect your future videos and eliminate parts your audience might find boring or irrelevant.
You can place cards at different points in your YouTube video that viewers can click on to watch another video, subscribe to a channel or open a third-party link. Card click-throughs basically show how many people clicked on any of the cards in your video.
This video metric shows which links your audience prefers clicking when watching videos or whether your card is optimally placed and timed.
YouTube lets you track your audience’s top locations, age and gender. You can also dig deeper and look at the views and watch time for each age or gender group.
This video metric is important because it helps you learn about who is watching your videos and engaging with them the most. Are you attracting the right audience? Or do you need to pivot your content?
This metric shows you where most of your video traffic is coming from. How are people finding your videos? Are they coming from search? Suggested videos? External websites? Learning about your top traffic sources helps you optimize the visibility of your videos.
This video metric is important if you’ve monetized your YouTube channel. You can track how much revenue a specific video has helped you earn per thousand views.
Present key metrics for your YouTube videos using the template below. This page is part of our complete video marketing report template that you can edit and download.
The largest social media platform in the world is also a great place to share videos about your brand. The only catch is that videos on Facebook tend to do better if they’re natively uploaded to the platform instead of shared via a link, such as from YouTube.
That said, let’s look at some important video metrics you need to keep an eye out for on Facebook.
These three video metrics help you measure the overall engagement on your videos. Facebook lets you track the number of likes, comments and shares you receive on both your original post and its shared versions.
This interesting video metric lets you see how many of the following you got on your posts:
A high number can show your video is offensive, irrelevant or simply uninteresting for your audience.
This video metric is specific to Facebook Live videos. You can track the highest number of viewers you got while live streaming on the platform. You can also see at which point your viewers started to drop off, which can help you improve future live streams.
Facebook also lets you track the impact of a video on your page growth. This helps you learn whether your content is convincing people to follow you or not. You can also see how many page likes you’re getting from your live streams.
This video metric is specifically for live videos where you can track how many people watched your stream till the end. Learn about whether your streams are engaging enough or if you need to make them more interesting so people stick around.
Present key video metrics for your Facebook ads and campaigns using the template below. This page is part of our complete video marketing report template that you can edit and download.
With Instagram features like Reels, Stories and Live Streaming, it’s no surprise that video is key to standing out on the platform. If you’re posting videos on Instagram, regardless of the format, here are some critical metrics to track.
Likes and comments represent the number of people who enjoyed watching your video. A higher number of these metrics indicates that your audience is engaged and shares similar interests.
People often hit like on various videos while scrolling through their feed, so this metric isn’t always reliable. Comments, however, show that people have shown interest in what you’ve posted and actively engaged with it.
This metric shows how many people checked out your profile after watching a video. A higher number of profile visits and follows can show that people found your content interesting and signed up for more.
But if you have lots of profile visits but not many follows, that can show that maybe you need to be more consistent in posting engaging content.
Saves are the number of people who saved your video to watch later. This can mean they found your content valuable and wanted to bookmark it for some reason. Shares, on the other hand, means your content was so interesting that people wanted to share it within their circle.
These two metrics give you insight into how valuable your content is and how viral it's becoming. Also, Instagram’s algorithm tends to favor posts with a higher number of shares and saves.
This video metric shows how many people found your video on Instagram. You can also view a breakdown of where you’re getting most of your impressions from, such as Home, hashtags, the explore page and more.
Follows show the number of people who followed you on Instagram after watching your video.
For example, they may have found your video through an Instagram ad or through the explore page. If they liked your content enough to see more from you, they’re likely to follow.
This video metric shows the highest number of people who watched your live stream at its busiest point.
Present key metrics for your Instagram videos using the template below. This page is part of our complete video marketing report template that you can edit and download.
You can’t talk about video and ignore TikTok. The fun, quirky video platform has become the world’s most downloaded app and has accumulated over 1 billion monthly active users in just five years.
The reason? Bite-sized vertical videos that have inspired even Instagram to jump on the bandwagon (i.e., Reels).
Let’s look at the key video metrics you need to track on TikTok.
This video metric shows you who’s watching your videos—distributed by gender. This is important because you need to ensure the people watching and enjoying your videos are those you set out to target in the first place.
This video metric shows your top, fastest-growing videos in the past week. You can learn about whether your videos are performing well or not with this metric.
A key TikTok video metric is follower activity, which shows when your followers are most active. You can use this data to post at optimal times and days of the week and get higher engagement. This will also boost your video’s visibility in the first few minutes or hours.
This video metric lets you see the popular videos that your followers watched. Analyzing these videos can help you come up with ideas for content your followers would love to engage with. You can also jump on new trends and challenges if relevant to your brand.
TikTok also lets you browse songs and audio clips your followers listened to. This is great for hopping on trends fast and using popular sounds in your videos.
Present key metrics for your TikTok videos using the template below. This page is part of our complete video marketing report template that you can edit and download.
If you’re struggling with the performance of your videos, here are some video tips and best practices to help you improve video metrics and get more results out of your content.
Before you create any video for your brand, it’s important to know:
Defining the goals of your video beforehand gives direction to all the processes involved, including script-writing, production and editing. But most of all, it helps you understand which KPIs and metrics to track and what success means to you.
Here’s a page taken from our video marketing report template to help you set goals:
As for the audience, you need to ensure your video resonates with their likes, dislikes and journey stage. And for that to happen, you need to know who these people are, what interests them, where they’re located and more.
Create customer personas to define your video’s audience before skipping ahead to production and distribution. Here’s a template you can use.
When creating a video, you need to optimize it for the specific channel/s you’re going to share it on. This includes the video’s size, format, length and content.
For example, Facebook recommends keeping in-stream video ads to 15 seconds max. If you’re creating an explainer video for your website, however, you can go up to five minutes or longer.
Let’s talk about size. If you’re creating video stories for Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, you’ll need to go with vertical dimensions. For Instagram feeds, square works great!
Pro Tip: Visme offers video templates in three sizes to help you share your content on multiple platforms. Choose from square, wide and vertical, and customize them as you like. You can also start with a custom size for your website.Similarly, don’t forget to tailor the content. TikTok users generally prefer to engage with fun, trendy videos. Instagram is great for sharing behind-the-scenes footage and shoppable ads. Do your research and create videos that are more likely to perform well on the chosen channels.
Thumbnails are super important for convincing people to click on your videos. Think about the last time you watched a YouTube video. Chances are, the thumbnail inspired you to watch that video over others.
Create enticing video thumbnails that align with your brand and pique your audience’s interest at first glance. Use Visme’s thumbnail templates to create an eye-catching thumbnail for your video in no time. Here’s an example:
One big reason for low conversions and click-throughs on videos is the lack of CTAs. If you don’t add proper CTAs, your audience won’t know what to do after watching your video.
Make it easy for them to take the “next step” by providing a link or button that takes them to your website, social media page, product page, pricing page or any other relevant place.
Just like blog posts and landing pages, your videos need to be optimized to show up on search results. And SEO isn’t only for Google. YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine and you need to implement specific SEO tactics to optimize your videos to rank higher there.
Incorporate relevant keywords into your titles and descriptions and add tags to your videos. Also, write SEO-friendly copy to accompany your video when sharing it online and engage with comments. Learn more about YouTube SEO.
Adding subtitles to your videos, especially social media videos, can help increase reach and engagement. There are several reasons for this:
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to video marketing. So, always test your campaigns while tweaking various video elements like length, CTAs and copy. See which version performs the best out of all and use that to maximize your results.
Knowing what video metrics to track can not only help you understand the performance of your videos, but also reveal insights into how to improve your future campaigns.
Looking to present video metrics visually to your team? Use Visme’s video marketing report template to consolidate video metrics from multiple channels, keep the management up-to-date, provide recommendations for next steps and more.
Or, access our library of hundreds of video templates to speed up video creation and improve video performance. Simply edit the templates with a few clicks in our online video maker.
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