Not measuring your video marketing is like rowing a boat with only one paddle: Try as you might, you’re probably traveling around and around in circles.

But measuring your videos willy-nilly won’t necessarily get you there any faster. Instead, use the goals you have for your video to determine your video marketing metrics. After all, how can you truly measure success if you don’t know what that success looks like?

So answer this: Are you trying to generate more leads? Drive brand reach? Encourage downloads of a helpful guide? No matter your goal, you should plan it out before you start production. Once that’s all set, use it to select which metrics to measure.

Goal #1: Attention Span

Are your viewers watching the whole video, or are they on to the next bigger-and-better piece of content after a few seconds? At Vidyard, we generally recommend maintaining a 60 percent retention rate, at minimum, and aiming to keep at least 80 percent of your viewers engaged until the end of your video.

Measuring the percentage of a video viewers consumed is an important metric to track for improving and optimizing your content—and is equally important from a lead-scoring perspective.

For optimizing content, tracking attention span means identifying times where large viewership drop-offs occur and using this to zero in on opportunities for improvement. For example, if your audience is leaving after 20 seconds, maybe your intro is too long.

From a lead-scoring point of view, attention span can offer great insights when your video marketing platform is integrated with your marketing automation platform (MAP). Here, you can see how much of your content individual leads are viewing, which means you can identify high quality leads, qualify them earlier, and convert them faster.

Video Marketing Metrics

1. Individual lead attention span: Track the attention spans of individual leads to identify highly engaged users or those with a high attention span, particularly if they watch more than 80 percent of your videos.
2. Percent retention overall: This is the percentage of viewers who watch the entire video. Knowing this can provide content-improvement opportunities.

Goal #2: Lead Generation

How well is your video capturing leads? An email gate, which is a form placed at the beginning or end of your video, is the most common form of direct lead generation from videos. These are often used on highly valuable video content, such as webinars. The question is, are yours performing well? How many people are inputting their email when you ask for it?

Keep in mind that it’s not only about the number of leads you generate, but the quality of them, too. Determine if your leads are being accepted by sales, known ironically as a “sales-accepted lead,” and also if they’re converting into qualified opportunities—or better yet, customers!

Video Marketing Metrics

1. Total number of form completions: This metric shows how many viewers filled out a video’s form. It’s particularly valuable when comparing multiple videos.
2. Percent of form completions: This metric shows you the number of viewers who fill out your form. A low completion rate can indicate poor communication of the value they’ll gain or too large of an ask, such as requesting their name, address, and eye color when all you really need is an email address.
3. Lead quality: This represents how many and what percentage of your video-generated leads are converting to sales-qualified leads (SQLs), sales-accepted leads (SALs), qualified opportunities, and customers.

Goal #3: Future Action

More often than not, you’ll use videos to promote future action after its consumption. Maybe you want to drive viewers from YouTube to your website, or maybe you’re asking them to download an eBook. Whatever it is, you’ll want to track whether they took action on your video, as well as whether they completed the future actions you were aiming for.

Video Marketing Metrics

1. Total number of click-throughs: How many viewers are clicking through to your site in total? Similar to total form completions, this metric is best when compared with previous videos’ results.
2. Click-through rate: Out of all the viewers who watched your video, how many clicked through? This metric helps you determine the effectiveness of your call to action and eliminates the impact of the total number of viewers.
3. Targeted action afterward: Beyond clicking the big, shiny button at the end of your video, are viewers actually taking the action you hoped for? Are they downloading that white paper or watching your next video?

Goal #4: Video Views

Notice that I’ve included view count at the very end here. That’s not because high view counts aren’t indicative of a successful video, but because this metric is overused and overvalued.

Essentially, your ultimate goal is to get sales, not go viral. If your videos aren’t generating leads or dollars, can you really count that as success?

My advice is to use view count in conjunction with other metrics. For example, 500 viewers watching your video all the way through and taking further action is superior to 10,000 viewers who watched the first 15 seconds before leaving for lunch.

Video Metrics

View count: How many people clicked “play”? Compare these numbers to other videos, too.

Remember, you must define success before you can measure it. Once you have a clear goal in mind—which you should decide on before planning a video project—select the metrics you’ll measure and ensure you have a way to collect data before launching your video.

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe to the Content Standard Newsletter.