Video metrics are important. Without them you have no idea who your video advertising is reaching, if they’re interacting, engaging, watching, thinking about the brand and what they think. But video metrics vary by service and have all manner of names so here’s a quick list of standard metrics with definitions.
The major video metrics:
View: Perhaps one of the most important as well as most variable metrics on the planet. With most advertising there is the impression, the ad being seen by the consumer. However, with video there’s another element that needs to be taken into account, the length of the ad. comScore says a video is viewed after 3 seconds of playing. Christophor Rick of ReelSEO says 50% or more. Some ad networks say 100% or no view counted. When you’re looking at views you have to make sure you know what the service means by a view. It makes sense that at least 50%
Video Click-Through: The basis for a video ad click-through rate (CTR). This means a viewer has clicked on the ad for more information or answers a call-to-action.
Completion Rate: Generally seen as a percentage of how many viewers watched a video or video ad through 50%, 75% and completion.
Completed view or Finish: When a viewer watches through to the end of a video or advertisement. This should only be counted when the entire video is watched (no scrubbing to skip parts) and basically should count as the full length of the ad was viewed.
Viewing time: How much time, or the duration, of a video view. This can include anything viewed after an action is taken like fast forward or rewind but not the the skipped portions unless they had previously been viewed in that session (see session below).
Session: This is another term that has multiple definitions. In some places it means all videos viewed in a single visit to a website. Others see it as videos viewed in a single video player load, which would then take into account things like playlists or autoplay of several videos. In some places this is tracked by number of videos while in other places it’s tracked by time spent viewing. In regards to campaign tracking, ROI, etc, it’s a shaky measure because it is too vague to be extremely useful.
Engagement: This term looks at how many interactions a viewer has in regards to a particular video. It can be reported as a single number. Far better is an engagement graph which shows far more data including how many interactions are happening during each part of the video. This also gives you an idea of some type of average engagement level as well as drop off levels so you can see where the majority of viewers abandon a video. Some services report engagement as a graph with seconds on the X axis and views on the Y to give you an idea of drop off.
Abandonment: Abandonment is the drop off of viewers from video. It tells you where viewers are leaving the video player in the duration of the video. Generally, if a video is too long or not interesting enough you will see a rapid drop off around a specific point. That helps you then shorten the video to make sure you get the message across before most viewers abandon or prepare to abandon.
Stream Quality: This metric gives you an idea about how well the video is streaming to viewers. This means you can find out if the video is too intense or rebuffering too much. It will also give you data on how much bandwidth is being pushed, how many rebuffers per view and how many lost viewers you had as well as start delay. How long did it take for the video to play after the player loaded.
We will continue this series with a look at more video metrics and analytics.
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