How to track the right video metrics for your business?

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably recording many videos and are interested in improving their impact. However, not all video metrics are created equal. The goal of this article is to move beyond the one-size-fits-all approach by helping you track the right metrics based on the specific goals you’re trying to achieve. Whether it's for video prospecting, marketing, internal communication, training, or meeting clips, each has its unique set of impactful metrics. Let’s dive deep into these use cases and unlock the metrics that truly matter for each.

Video Metrics for Video Prospecting

If you’re using videos for prospecting, your end goal is likely to book a demo by sending a short video message to your prospect. These videos are probably recorded and ultra-targeted for one or a few prospects, so it’s better to check video metrics with a very qualitative and narrowed approach, describing all the steps towards booking a demo:

• Impressions: Impressions indicate if a prospect opened your video. If you don’t have any impressions, it probably means that you need to fix something in your email copy or video thumbnail to make your prospect want to click on the link.
• Views: Measures the number of views of the video. If you see that a person has watched your video multiple times, it probably means they are pretty interested.
• View Rate: Measures the percentage of viewers who watched the video after seeing it. Essential for understanding initial engagement. If this number is low, it means that you lost the prospect's attention and that your pitch was probably not on point.
• Engagement Rate: Check out Likes or Comments to see how prospects are interested in your video. This only works if you have enabled them on your video.
• Conversion Rate: Tracks how many viewers complete a desired action, such as booking a demo, after watching the video. If someone watches your video, seems engaged but doesn’t convert, consider testing your CTA in your email or adding one directly on your video.
• Feedback and Responses: Qualitative analysis of direct responses or inquiries received, indicating the video's effectiveness in generating leads. Since each video is unique,

Video Metrics for Marketing Videos

There are often debates about the purpose of marketing videos. Do you want to use them in paid campaigns to generate leads right away, or do you want to educate your audience and build brand awareness instead? While the debate is interesting, we will focus here on the key metrics to track if you’re optimizing for the second option: building brand awareness and educating your audience. Most platforms where you can display videos (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.) push users to scroll or watch other videos, so you might be disappointed with the results if you only optimize for lead creation.

So, here’s a deep dive into the metrics you want to check and how to interpret them:

• Impressions: Indicate how many times your video thumbnails were shown to viewers.
• Impressions Click-Through Rate: Views per impressions shown. This measures how often viewers watched a video after seeing an impression. Typically, if you feel like it’s too low, you might need to optimize your title or thumbnail to drive more views.
• Views: Total views for the selected date range, region, and other filters.
• View Rate: Percentage of the video people watched.
• Average View Duration: Estimated average minutes watched per view for the selected content, date range, region, and other filters. Here it's interesting to understand when your audience drops. That’s why many video creators will tell you that the first 10 seconds are often the most important ones.
• Engagement Metrics: Includes likes, shares, and comments, showing how viewers interact with the content.
• Watch Time: Total amount of time viewers have spent watching the video, indicating its ability to retain interest.
• Conversion Rate: Especially important for marketing videos to measure the effectiveness in driving sales or desired actions.
• Brand Lift: Assessing the impact on brand awareness and perception, often through surveys or indirect measures like search volume for the brand. A way to measure it is to check the number of visits coming from your “brand” keyword.

Video Metrics for Internal Communication

The purpose of video messaging used for internal communication is to communicate important information, company updates, or decisions and to make sure everyone is aligned. When checking the impact, you might want to check two things: 1) the message is seen, 2) the target audience understands.

In general, we recommend checking the following stats in your video analytics in Claap:

• Impressions: You can check if people individually opened the video. If it’s not the case, we recommend sending a reminder.
• Viewers: Indicate if people have viewed your video.
• Views: Indicate how many times someone has viewed your video and when.
• View Rate: Percentage of the video that is watched by a user.
• Feedback Loop & Engagement Rate: Encouraging and tracking employee feedback to gauge understanding and effectiveness. We recommend using polls and questions directly on the video to ensure people can ask questions and that your message comes across.

One of the main differences between Internal Communication and Marketing Videos, for example, is that you can focus on a more individual level for Internal Communication. If you expect an answer from someone in your company, you can directly check if your message was checked, and if not, send a reminder.

Video Metrics for Training

The purpose of training videos is quite similar to internal communication. You want to explain important things to newcomers – or upskill existing employees with new knowledge – and make sure they really understand.

For training videos, we recommend checking the following metrics:

• Impressions: You can check if people individually opened the video. If someone asked you a question on how to do something and a tutorial exists, you can easily check if they’re aware of its existence.
• Viewers: Indicate who viewed your video and when. If you see someone missing, it can give some good indications on how to upskill someone in your company and re-share the video tutorial.
• Views: Indicate how many times someone watched your video. Some tutorials might be seen many times by the same person, proving that it’s pretty valuable (it indicates the number of times you avoid repeating the same thing).
• View Rate: Percentage of the video that is watched by a user. Measure the effectiveness of your content. If the tutorial is too long and you see a drop, consider dividing it into shorter videos using Claap’s video editing features.
• Feedback Loop & Engagement Rate: Encouraging and tracking employee feedback to gauge understanding and effectiveness. We recommend using polls and questions directly on the video to ensure people can ask questions and that your message comes across.

Video Metrics for Meeting Clips

Recording meetings is slightly different compared with the other use cases. I’ve noticed many people tend to record company all-hands or external meetings but often complain that no one is watching them. It’s because no one has the time to watch 30-minute videos.

In that case, you need to aim for different video metrics, depending on your case:

• Case 1: People don’t need to watch the video but can easily scan important information using AI summaries and automated highlights. In that case, just check if people read the summary by looking at the impressions. If you expect an answer from them, you can also directly tag them in the comments.
• Case 2: Not all parts of the videos are important. In that case, use auto-chapters to let people jump to the right sections of the videos. Alternatively, you can also cut the video to extract only the most important parts and you can use the same metrics as for Internal communication.

Conclusion & Checklist

There are probably other use cases you have in mind to track video metrics. These examples are here to help you define the ones that make more sense for your business. If I had to give a quick checklist of the things to do:

• Define the main objective of your video.
• Define the steps to reach this objective that you can track.
• Define the conversion rate from one step to another and if there are benchmarks.
• Define some qualitative metrics to help you better understand how to optimize your video content.