Video Metrics You Need To Analyze Across All Social Channels

You’ve created a bunch of killer video content, promoted it, and now you’re starting to see some results.

By analyzing the right video metrics, you can learn how people interact with your content and highlight areas of improvement to generate a higher ROI in future marketing campaigns.

In this article, we will break down the most important video metrics to track. By the end, you’ll learn to scrutinize video performance more effectively and improve all areas of customer engagement with your video marketing content.

Conversions And Revenue Generated

For most businesses, success comes down to one thing: how much revenue did something create? As Chief Marketing Officers will know, it’s likely to be the first question asked during any board meeting.

While this isn’t always the case in marketing, revenue generated is still one of the most important metrics to track.

Tracking a video’s success in terms of revenue can be tricky, but there are four ways to do it:

1. Use a promo code

Create a unique discount code (to be used at checkout) that you only promote in your video ad. If a user activates the code, it’s safe to say they got it from your video ad. All you need to do then is count how many times the code has been redeemed in your sales transactions to get an idea of your campaign’s success.

2. UTMs

A UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a piece of tracking code that allows you to track which third-party websites or specific social media posts are driving traffic to your website. It’s not as complicated as it sounds; you only need to add extra parameters to your website URLs. Google provides a free tool to do this for you. Afterward, you can track conversions and revenue data from these link clicks inside Google Analytics.

3. Site pixel

A site pixel is a piece of Javascript that sends tracking data directly to analytics dashboards. Primarily used to track ad sales, every major social media platform offers site pixels for free to its customers.

4. Time-series analysis

Much less scientific but still effective, a time-series analysis compares two time periods based on results.

For example, compare a month where you posted video campaigns to one where you didn’t. Was there an increase in sales in the month that used video? If so, you can attribute that directly to your video content.

Cost Per View

Cost per view (CPV) is when you pay a fee for every time your video plays. Mostly, CPV is most commonly used to monitor the performance of video ads.

There are two ways to calculate CPV:

1. Gross cost: how much you spent vs. how many views you generated (gross cost = ad spend / views)
2. Net cost: how much it costs to produce and promote the video. E.g., subscriptions, staff labor, production, and equipment (net cost per view = production cost + ad spend / views)

By measuring video metrics like CPV, you can keep a close eye on spending, making it easier to spot ads that aren’t generating a profit.

While CPV is mostly an ads metric, monitoring the net cost of your organic video campaigns is also useful to determine if posting that content is driving business growth.

Return-On-Investment (ROI)

ROI helps you evaluate how well a financial investment is performing. In simple terms, it helps you assess whether your video made a profit or not.

Regarding marketing strategy, ROI is a top-level metric to justify spending and budget distribution. Whenever starting a new marketing campaign, I set an ROI target of 3:1, which is $3 generated in revenue for every $1 spent. If anything falls below this, I recommend ceasing that activity and focusing your budget on the marketing channels exceeding the 3:1 ratio. That’s where the profitability is.

Ideally, you need to calculate the ROI of video content across every social media platform you post to. That way, you can gauge your video strategy’s performance on TikTok compared to Facebook or YouTube to see which is the most profitable and deserves the biggest financial investment.

Total Views (view count)

Total views (or view count) are one of the easiest ways to assess the performance of a video. The more times a video is watched, the more exposure your brand enjoys.

View count is also a great way to measure your organic reach, a social media metric that calculates how many of your page followers see your organic posts in their newsfeeds. Organic reach does not include figures from your paid ad campaigns.

You can calculate your organic reach percentage using the following formula:

• (Total number of followers / video views) x 100 = video organic reach %

Suppose the percentage of your organic reach is over 100% or close. In that case, your posts reach people outside your network, which is a good sign that your video marketing strategy generates new customers.

Overall Engagement

Engagement is anything video viewers do in response to your content. It could be a comment, a like, a share, a subscription, or a complete view.

Social media platforms love engagement; their algorithms are programmed to provide more organic reach to accounts that regularly generate engagement on their posts.

Every piece of content you post should encourage the user to act, whether it’s a like, share, or comment. For example, when did you last watch a YouTube video that didn’t ask you to “like and smash that subscribe button?”

Other engagement metrics to pay attention to include average view duration, play rate, and watch time.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR%) And Referral Traffic

In this context, click-through rate (CTR%) refers to the number of people who click any link you’ve placed into your content.

The link could be in the comments below your post, embedded into the video player (some social media platforms, such as Facebook, support this), or embedded in an image or banner.

Clicks on your content are vitally important. Simply put, without clicks, you can’t achieve conversions – whether that’s a sale, signing up for your newsletter, or following your page on social – it all starts with a click.

Low click-through rates mean your video content isn’t hitting the right mark. Viewers watch, but they’re not compelled to buy.

Here are a few issues your video might have:

• The CTA isn’t clear enough
• The content is feature focused and not problem-led
• The video didn’t resonate with your target audience

CTR is a good indicator of your website’s health, too. For example, if you have a high CTR but few sales, then there’s a problem somewhere in your sales funnel.

It could be a technical error, such as slow page speed, or a branding issue – for example, there’s a disconnect between the video branding and your websites, putting people off.

Learn how the best websites with video on the internet are using videos to generate more traffic and improve their UX in this breakdown.

Share Of Voice

Share of voice (SOV) is your brand’s visibility compared to your competition.

For example, if 1000 conversations take place online about your industry and your brand is mentioned in 200 of those conversations, your share of voice is 20% (200/1000 x 100).

To track your share of voice, look at three key areas:

• Social media – is your brand mentioned in industry-related threads?
• SEO – how does the search volume of your brand name compare to competing brands or general informational searches in your space?
• Online media – are major publications referencing your brand when discussing your niche?

You’ll need some specialist social media reporting tools to track this video metric. Trusted options include HootSuite (social media), Hubspot (social media), Google Keyword Planner (paid ads), and Ahrefs (SEO).

Audience Retention

Audience retention is vital to success on YouTube. This metric tracks how many people watch your video and for how long (average watch time and view duration).

Knowing the point at which people stop watching your video is key to improving your content. Maybe a certain topic is turning people off, or your intro is too long, and people lose interest.

The longer you keep your target audience engaged with your video content, the more likely they will make a sale. Statistics show that viewers who watch an entire video are more likely to take action.

For a more detailed explanation of YouTube’s audience retention metric, how it works, what to look for, and ways to improve your channel’s average play duration, read Viddyoze’s expert guide.

New Subscribers Growth

Subscribers are warm leads. They’re receptive to your products, even if they have yet to make a purchase. They want to see more content from your brand; otherwise, they wouldn’t have subscribed for alerts.

You want to pick up new subscribers steadily to continue building your ‘owned traffic.’

Owned traffic is people or sales prospects you can contact anytime. Such as when you post a new YouTube video and need to drive early views to gain traction on the platform.

Consistently building your audience through new subscriber growth is a sign of a healthy YouTube marketing funnel.

Impressions And Click-Throughs

The click-through rate for YouTube differs from the standard CTR% we explained previously. On YouTube, CTR% measures the number of people that have clicked play on your video after seeing it in search results.

Impressions are the number of times your video appears in YouTube search results.

Click-through rate and impressions are deeply intertwined. You can only generate clicks with impressions. Plus, the total number of impressions will guide how many clicks are up for grabs on your videos.

If you’re getting tons of impressions on a new video but hardly any clicks, you need to improve the following three areas:

1. Thumbnail image – make it more eye-catching. See what colors the competing videos use and then use a color that visually clashes with them.
2. Video title – your title needs to stand out compared to others in the same search result. I’d recommend using numbers and brackets in your title to make them more visually unique.
3. Video description – try being more descriptive. Searchers only click through when they have complete confidence the video will provide the information they’re looking for.

By tracking both video analytics, you can dramatically improve your YouTube traffic. You can only get views on your content with impressions and clicks.

To learn more about Video SEO and how to drive organic traffic to your website and YouTube channel, read our guide by SEO expert John Butterworth.

YouTube Engagement

Hubspot found that engagement was the most important metric for marketers – and YouTube is no different.

The YouTube algorithm responds positively to engagement (likes, shares, and subscribers) by making your video content easier to find. The logic is quite simple: YouTube sees that people enjoy and respond to your content, so it helps promote your content.

Viddyoze Top Tip: pin a comment at the top of your video and try and stimulate conversation.

Organic Reach Based On Content Type

Reels, posts, Stories, live videos – Instagram has many different ways to share videos, and you can see which format performs best for you using the Instagram dashboard.

Pay specific attention to your organic reach across each video format in the dashboard. The higher the percentage, the more effective the content.

For example, if Reels account for 50% of your organic reach, your posts and stories account for 40%, and the final 10% is from live video. These percentages show that Reels is your best performer, which suggests that you should dedicate more time and resources to this content type to achieve the best ROI.

Swipe Up Actions

A Swipe Up is a way to drive people from Instagram to a landing page. Think of this as a CTR% for Instagram Stories (because the feature is exclusive to Stories).

Swipe-ups are great for two reasons:

1. They let you measure the effectiveness of your video Stories
2. And allow you to track the behavior of your leads once they land on your website

It’s best practice to add a UTM tag to your link to keep track of the platforms driving traffic to your website. UTMs also help when calculating the channel’s ROI later.

Around 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily, showing how important Instagram has become as a video platform.

Peak Live Viewers

A third of internet users watch some type of live video every week. There’s tons of scope for businesses to get their social media videos in front of potential customers.

Live video streaming is great for collecting feedback and building a community. You can take questions in real-time and reply directly to your audience; this helps build relationships and gain quick feedback on your initiatives.

The Peak Live Viewers metric on Instagram shows how many people were watching your broadcast at the same time. Analyzing this data helps you determine marketing video ideas and when to use audience participation during your broadcast.

In addition, the peak live viewers metric can help you forecast future sales. All you need to know is your average conversion rate from live videos, then divide that by the number of peak live viewers of your broadcast.

Experiment with different days of the week and times of the day to find out when your live streams get the best attendance.

Instagram Reels Accounts Reached

Reels are Instagram’s most engaging type of video content; they get 22% more engagement than your average video post.

Within Instagram, Reels has its own analytics section. You can see video metrics such as accounts reached, video plays, likes, comments, shares, and saves. It’s basic, but it’s a good place to monitor the performance of your content.

Insta’s answer to TikTok, the main point of Reels, is to show viewers new videos constantly. Therefore, the most important metric to monitor is “accounts reached.”

Due to the sheer size of its audience, Reels is a brilliant feature for improving your brand awareness. Instagram boasts a monthly viewership of 2.35 billion people – most of which interact with the Reels feature.

Your priority should be increasing your ‘accounts reached’; this will give you the best platform to achieve your other marketing objectives.

Follower Growth And Sentiment

Follower growth is a key metric for any social media site. It’s also one of the easiest to track.

Success here comes down to the individual brand, but it’s a good idea to aim for month-on-month increases, no matter how small the increases might be.

As your followers grow, you’ll likely see an uptick in comments. Keep an eye on comments for their sentiment. Are they positive or negative? Not only does this offer a good reflection of your relationship with the consumer, but it gives you a chance to focus on areas they think need improvement.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give you is that retaining customers is just as important as generating new ones. Your customers are the ones who use your product regularly. Listen when they have suggestions to make it better.

Incorporating good customer feedback into your product can only help to retain your customers for longer and remove barriers to purchase for new customers.

If you can, respond to each comment you receive and acknowledge your customer’s comments, good or bad. Doing this will show that you value your customers’ feedback, a key component in creating avid brand advocates.

Audience Demographics

Facebook gives users one of the most advanced analytics dashboards in social media. You can monitor audience demographics granularly, using filters for age, gender, location, and more.

It’s also a very useful way to monitor the relevancy of your content. In other words, you don’t want to waste time and resources by displaying your marketing videos to people who will never buy your product.

Hypothetically, if your ideal customer is a 25-year-old male from the US, but the biggest demographic watching your Facebook videos is 60-year-old Albanian women. Your targeting settings and content strategy are all wrong.

To fix this, doubly important for your online video advertising campaigns, you must narrow your demographic targeting down to people who fit your ideal customer’s description.

Read this thorough article for more information on how to create branded video content that your target audience will love.

Negative Feedback

In many ways, negative feedback is just as important as positive feedback because it helps you to fix the things people don’t like.

Beyond negative comments and complaints, there are a few ways to track negative sentiment on Facebook. The platform provides a ‘negative feedback’ report that allows you to see the following interactions:

• How many people have hidden your content from their timeline
• How many people have reported it as spam
• How many people unsubscribe from your page after seeing your content

Of course, the odd person is nothing to worry about – everyone has different tastes, but when you start to spot a trend, this tool can be a lifesaver.

Negative feedback is a crucial video metric to track because it highlights what content your audience doesn’t want to see. Learn from this and improve your future video content marketing.

Video Retention Duration

We’ve touched on the importance of audience retention for different platforms, and the concept is very much the same for Facebook.

You can monitor the points when people drop out of your videos, giving you a good idea of video content that’s either boring, irrelevant, or both. Keep an eye on the video completion rate for the same reasons.

Clicks, Comments, Likes, And Shares

Engagement on Facebook is the same as on YouTube. The platform reacts well to comments, likes, and shares. The more reactions you have, the more Facebook will push your content into its users’ feeds.