Erin Hynes July 27, 2021 In recent years, video has gained significant popularity amongst advertisers. According to Wyzowl’s 2021 State of Video Marketing report, 87% of video marketers report that video gives them a positive return on investment (ROI). One reason why video performs so well is that this ad format incorporates audio and visual elements that appeal to multiple senses. Video ads like native, native outstream, in-stream and interstitial capture—and hold—the attention of viewers.
Why Video Marketing Metrics Are Important
Metrics are an important part of any programmatic campaign. Regardless of if you’re running a campaign on video, native, display, audio, or another channel, metrics are what will measure the success (and ROI!) of your media mix.
Video metrics provide insights that allow you to optimize and improve your video campaigns. It’s only through tracking views, completion rate, and other metrics that you can understand where the pain points and strengths of your video are, and then make adjustments accordingly.
To help you get started with video marketing metrics, we’ve summarized the key metrics that you should be tracking.
Watch Time and Completion Rate
Watch time and completion rate measure how much of your video a user watched. These rates help determine whether or not your audience is finding the content you’ve produced engaging. Watch time measures the exact amount of seconds that a viewer watched, and completion rate measures how many viewers watched your video in full.
How to Achieve High Watch Time and Video Completion Rates
The goal is always to achieve high watch time and a high completion rate. If those metrics are performing, then you know viewers are engaged with your video campaign.
One of the biggest mistakes marketers continue to make in video advertising is telling rather than showing. Video is a visual medium. A diatribe on the benefits of your product or service won’t hold the attention of viewers.
Instead, focus on creating enticing content that captures attention from the start, and tells a story. Plan creative that resonates with the demographic you’re trying to reach by aligning your messaging with your customer profiles, and leverage humour and entertainment to hold attention.
Cost Per Completed View (CPCV)
Cost per completed view (CPCV) measures the amount paid by an advertiser to the publisher once a video has been viewed through to completion.
What Causes a High Cost Per Completed View
CPCV is calculated by dividing your total ad spend by the number of completed video views. Traditionally, CPCV prices between $ 0.10-0.30, but alternative formats such as native outstream perform at an average of $ 0.02. If your CPCV is high, it’s best to re-evaluate your creative, your video format, and your distribution plan because one of these things just isn’t working for you.
How To Ensure a Low CPCV
If you’re finding you have a high CPCV, then something is off with your video strategy. Perhaps your video isn’t performing well due to the type of ad inventory you’ve opted for, maybe viewership is continually dropping off at the 32-second mark.
The best way to combat high prices is to continually test a variety of formats, video lengths and distribution channels. As much as we’d love a one size fits all solution, each campaign is unique and requires A/B testing and continued optimization.
More Video Metrics to Track
Watch time, completion rate, and CPCV are great metrics to start out with when digging into your video marketing data. Once you’re comfortable with these, you can begin exploring your data in more detail.
Below are some of the metrics that you can use to optimize your video campaigns with even more precision:
- Video starts: This metric tells you how many times your video has been started. Note that this metric is great for understanding how many viewers your video reached, but it doesn’t provide insight into how long they watched or how engaged they were with the video.
- Quartile completion: This metric enables you to dig deeper into analyzing watch time. It tracks the number of impressions for which an ad clip played to the end of the first quarter of the video’s total length. You can leverage this metric when trying to understand video dropoff: the point at which viewers are losing interest in your ad. And, you can retarget based on the time a user watched until with relevant messaging to complete the story, if they didn’t finish the ad.
- Completes: This metric reports the number of times that 100% of your video was viewed. It’s important to distinguish this metric from completion rate. Completion rate is the percentage of times the video played to the end, whereas completes are presented as a number.
Get Started With Video Marketing Metrics
As with all marketing content, it’s important to measure the effectiveness of every video you publish. By leveraging the metrics we’ve mentioned above, you can establish goals for your video campaigns, benchmarks to achieve, and you can determine where your campaigns may be falling short. From there, you can make tweaks to improve your results and reach those video marketing goals.
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