Video marketing is part of the newest wave of marketing tools available to businesses and agencies. Video is engaging, powerful content which is especially effective with younger markets.

Presuming you’re creating videos that communicate your message and bring in an audience, how do you know how successful they are? This is a vital action to take, because otherwise it’s unclear how well your investment on video marketing activity is performing.

This is where the importance of video marketing metrics come in. For this blog, we’re mainly going to be discussing YouTube metrics as it’s the most common video platform, but other players exist too.

Here’s five metrics you should be paying attention to:

1. View count

The view count is the simplest and easiest metric to measure. It displays the total number of views your video has received over time. You can use the view counts of various videos in comparison to show which videos your audience prefers.

This feeds back into the content creation process because you can then create more videos of the type your audience prefers.

2. Ratings

On YouTube, there’s a system of ratings which shows whether viewers ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ your content.

You can use this with the view count to determine videos that your audience likes or dislikes. Sometimes, a video will have a high view count but also a higher number of dislikes than usual.

This could mean that it’s a controversial video which polarises viewers. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing – because it could mean more people sharing and discussing your video – though you don’t want it to be hugely disliked or that will reflect on your brand.

3. Discovery events

YouTube gives insights into where your traffic came from. This is incredibly valuable to marketers. It can show you whether they’re arriving from your website, social media, or from external third party sites that might have shared your content.

With this knowledge, you can manipulate your marketing strategy to emphasise those platforms that have the highest rate of referral of traffic to YouTube. In this way, you’ll see more views on your videos (and communication of your business message) over time.

4. Audience demographics

It’s possible to see the gender, age and geographic location of your viewers. This has two uses.

Firstly, you can see with which market your content is most resonating, and do further research to improve the way your video is communicated to that market for a greater edge.

Or, if you set out to market to a particular demographic in the first place, you can see how well you reached it and determine the success of your activity through that frame.

5. Viewer drop off

Engagement isn’t just how many people watched your video. It goes deeper than that, and one way to track it is to see how many people watched all the way through your video by checking viewer drop off.

By seeing where viewers stopped watching your video, you can identify weak points that may be less engaging. This is especially the case if it’s not a steady decline, but a sudden drop off of a significant portion of viewers at a particular point.