3 metrics to gauge your video’s success

Let’s face it, video is hot—and everyone knows it. Video gets people more excited and engaged with the message we marketers are trying to convey than do paragraphs of text. But one major problem that most marketers have with video is this: How the heck do you measure its success?

Most of us look at the play count to measure the success of our work. But is that really the best way?

Let’s say a million people watched a video, but on average they watched only the first 10 seconds of it before leaving the site it’s on. Is that really a successful video? What if a million people came to the page where you hosted the video but only 10,000 actually clicked to watch it; are you doing a good job? The answer isn’t clear: You got a lot of people to watch it, but they were not very engaged.

We’ve been attacking this very pain point of video success measurement ever since we started our company, Wistia, which aims to help small businesses figure out whether their videos are successful. Recently we analyzed millions of videos we host, and we found three main metrics that marketers should use to measure the success of their videos.

1. The “engagement” metric