Your videos are competing with a virtual sea of content from your competitors to the latest viral sensation. If you’ve decided to go with an animated business video, you’ve already made at least one right choice, but even with the best script and the best visuals, you can’t just drop your video on YouTube and hope for the best. You have to have a solid distribution plan, obviously, and you also have to have a way to measure the effectiveness of your video.

When it comes to measuring effectiveness, some metrics are more useful than others when you want to see just how well your video is performing and how well your message is getting out there.

These are the four most important metrics to measure to gauge your video’s effectiveness:

Targeted Reaction

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Ascertaining whether people have watched a video isn’t as important as ascertaining whether they’ve taken a specific action after watching the video. You have a specific action you want viewers to perform after they’ve watched the video and that’s what really counts. It’s great if people watch the video, but if they don’t give you their contact info or perform whatever your call to action is, their view is less valuable than someone who did perform your CTA.

You can easily check whether the CTA is being followed by measuring click-through rates or other metrics that will tell you specifically if it’s been followed. These are the measurements that will tell you if your videos are generating the right response from viewers.  

Completed Viewings

 

Another problem with putting too much emphasis on the view count is that it doesn’t tell you if people watched the entire video. All it tells you is that people watched the video up until the point where the view counter kicked in. The completions counter is a more important indicator of how effective your video is because it tells you if people are watching the whole thing.  

Although not everyone who watches your entire video will perform your CTA, it at least shows interest in your product or service and indicates that they may take action at a later date. It can also give you an indication of whether you have an effective CTA. If a lot of people are watching your entire video, but not performing the CTA, that could be an indication that you need to try a new call to action. Ideally, you should have a few to cycle through so you can compare them and see which one works best.

Viewability

 

People have different preferences about how a video should play. Of course, people expect YouTube videos to play automatically when they visit the YouTube page, but they might find that to be a nuisance on your site. You can check the playback function numbers to help you decide if you should have your video autoplay or not. If you have it set to autoplay and an overwhelming number of people are hitting “pause” right away, that probably means you shouldn’t have it autoplaying.

You can also use the playback numbers to tell you where in your video people are losing interest. If it’s a minute long video, but most people are stopping it 20 seconds in, you may want to try a different opening to catch people’s attention. Or, it could be an indication that viewers only need that amount of time to get the gist of your video, meaning you may want to cut down the running time of future videos.

Engagement

 

You can introduce your own metric to check in the form of some kind of social engagement CTA like a hashtag. You’ll easily be able to see how much engagement a hashtag is generating and you’ll be able to follow the conversations people are having when they use the hashtag. This can easily tell you if your message is getting out to people.

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your video, you also must keep ROI in mind, too. It may not be worth it to spend so much money on a video if each lead is costing you exorbitant amounts of money.

Knowing if your video is reaching the right audience and prompting them to take the action you want is a crucial step in perfecting your video marketing strategy. One type of video that has consistently proven to do well with engaging prospects is an animated explainer video. Click here to schedule an appointment with WizMotions to see how we can help you make the perfect business video.