In the first part of talking about metrics we ran through some of the major things that all online video marketers need to know about. In this second part we’ll look at less popular metrics but equally important for reporting and campaign assessment.
A lot of the major metrics do not deal with video player interaction at all. Things like mute, full screen, collapse, etc. These can be vital indicators of where your campaign videos are working, or going wrong.
Mute/Unmute – If you are pushing your message out audibly and not visually then you might be missing a large cross-section of your audience. Many people might be watching at work with the sound off or down. Others might be simply muting the ads. So if you don’t have a call-to-action with a visual element or a visual version of your message, it might be getting lost in translation.
Collapse/Expand/Full Screen – These are valuable metrics to track as well. For example, are viewers collapsing the video pane when the ads run? That could mean that they’re losing interest and going to do something else until the ad ends. If they’re expanding or going to full screen at a particular point in a video or ad it could be renewed or increased interest. This could couple with the next metric for some great insight into how viewers are watching your content and ads.
Rewind/Fast Forward – If you are giving the viewers options to rewind and fast forward you’ll want to know if and exactly when they’re using them. You might even just offer them rewind, so if they pause, expand, rewind you know exactly what they’re looking at in that expanded window and why. Then you can focus on that to expand either your content or your advertisements.
Play/Pause/Resume – Did I mention pause? You see why this would be useful, especially if you’ve got some sort of visual call-to-action like an email or phone number. If users are pausing when that is on screen you might want to make them interactive overlays so they can continue watching but get more information outside of the video player. Resume is also important if they are pausing for that information I mentioned above because you then know that is a lot of people are pausing at the same spot, that’s probably the reason.
Accepted Invitation – Another metric that won’t always apply but can speak volumes is the accept invitation meaning that the viewer clicked on a companion ad or interactive overlay to display further information over the video player content. This definitely gives some good idea what it is that your viewers are interested in and what they’re looking for, coupons, discounts, store locations, etc. Each of these should be able to be tracked separately so you know what invitation they chose.
Minimize – What? They’ve shrunk the video player away to nothing while the ads are playing and expanded it again when the ad was done playing? That’s not fair, but if you track this you know they’re doing it and can build something into the campaign to bring them back.
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