Why Vanity Metrics are holding you back
Overview
For as long as I can remember people have been obsessed with vanity metrics. You can think of likes on Facebook, social media followers and other metrics that on the surface appear important and amazing, but more often than not come up short to deliver meaningful insights to move your business forward.
In this article we are going to cover video metrics that matter and why you should care about them. Also, NOT all solutions are created equal for public vs private video content.
Industry Trends
Core to any marketing offering is the ability to measure performance. Whether it is integrated to an already existing dashboard or within the tool/service itself.
In non-marketing scenarios, analytics can help other professionals like filmmakers or thought leaders and influencers that require video engagement metrics.
Anyone who has used video as a communication tool, marketing asset, or final project deliverable understands the importance of measuring engagement with your viewers. It is no longer enough to just see you had a total of X views, or X number of people watched your video. This rarely tells anything more than a High Level, Low Impact story. The real insights are in the details.
Why Deep Analytics Matter
Ultimately you invest time, energy and money into developing engaging and impactful video content for a variety of audiences. However, how do you know if the video had the impact you wanted? In order to create actionable insights, you need insightful data.
For example, let’s say you have a 1 minute product demo video. The vanity metrics might show you had 9,031 total views by 8,253 unique viewers. However, what if 80% of your viewers were dropping off after 23 seconds? You might want to then investigate and focus on what happened at that timecode.
Another example could be if 80% of your viewers dropped off within 5 seconds. In this scenario you likely failed to capture their attention right out of the gate. In this instance you would want to make modifications to the intro of your video and compare against other successful videos you have.
Video Engagement
Total Plays:
This figure represents the total number of times a video has been played. If the same person watches a video twice it will count as two plays. Also, if a person doesn’t complete the entire video it will still count as a play.
Unique Plays:
This data point represents the total number of individuals that played a video. For example, if the same person watched a video five times they would only be counted as one unique play.
Total Play Rate:
The play rate is the overall percentage the video gets played after it loads on a screen for a viewer (plays versus impressions). For example, if you were to embed a video on your website, and only a third of the visitors actually clicked on the video to play it, the play rate would be 33%. To increase this percentage, you would look into making the poster frame more enticing, better positioning the embedded video, or removing any other visual distractions on the page.
Unique Play Rate:
This is the percentage of unique viewers that play the video after it loads. This metric more accurately identifies the play rate on a per-viewer basis, as it consolidates all the data where viewers return to the page of the video but may not play it again. While these return visits lower your total play rate, they do not impact the unique play rate.
Total Engagement Percentage:
This figure represents the amount of time a viewer watches a video as a percentage of the total video. It shows overall how engaging your video content is. For example, if a person watched 1 minute of a 2 minute video, the video engagement rate would be 50%.
Unique Engagement:
Unique engagement is the average percentage of the video each unique viewer watches out of the total duration. For example, viewers may come back to rewatch the video, but maybe they only want to rewatch a small segment again. This rewatch of a small segment would lower the total engagement, but not the unique engagement.
Total Downloads:
Downloads are counted when a viewer initiates the download of any resolution of the video.
Unique Downloads:
Unique downloads is the number of unique viewers that initiate a download of the video.
How Do I Decide Which Service to Use?
Determine if a video has sensitive information that can’t or shouldn’t see the light of day. Ask yourself, “If this video went viral and anyone had free access to it, what damage would it cause?”
Determine if you are delivering a group of videos or just a standalone video. If you have more than one video for a project, don’t try to shoehorn yourself with a one-trick pony video platform that doesn’t allow you to package multiple videos into a single deliverable.
How much time will you and your team waste living with video solutions that aren’t purpose built for your needs?
MediaZilla recently released a major improvement to video analytics so people can make better, more informed decisions. If you have sensitive, private videos that need viewing by internal and/or external stakeholders, sign up for a free trial and learn more about our solution. https://mediazilla.com
You can also Book a Call with us to discuss your unique situation. https://mediazilla.com/book-a-demo
MediaZilla is a privacy-first video platform focused on helping you deliver the world’s most important videos.