May 9th, 2019

5 Video Metrics to Help You Make Better Business Decisions

In today's digital world, it's crucial that marketers are data-driven in their business decisions.

And while 87% of marketers use video as part of their digital strategy, according to our State of Online Video Report, only 21% of those marketing teams have their video data integrated into their marketing tech stack. How can we close this gap and be more data-driven when making business decisions?

In this blog post, I’ll cover insights into interpreting marketing data, and help identify important video metrics you should be paying attention to in order to make better business decisions, all from the growth perspective.

First, I would like to introduce the reverse calculation framework, something I believe all sales and marketing teams should try. By applying this framework, you will know what marketing metrics you need to meet in order to achieve your business goals.

For example, let's say your business goal is to close 8 new customers. Each business has their own unique conversion rates, so for the sake of this example, I've applied B2B benchmark conversion rates and calculated backwards from 8 won customers, all the way back to see how many impressions you will need to generate in order to achieve this business goal.

From this example, you can see you will need to generate 84,000 additional impressions in order to get 4,200 more clicks, to try to get an additional 210 leads, of which 63 should be good enough to qualify as MQLs to pass on to Sales so they can secure at least 25 additional meetings and hopefully win 30% of them to achieve your business goal of 8 new customers.

And breathe...

So the question is: how can you achieve these metrics without breaking the bank?

The answer: video.


  • Our brains are able to process images 60,000 times faster than text. Source: T-Science
  • 68% of consumers would prefer to learn about a product through video as opposed to reading an article or having a sales call. Source: HubSpot
  • 79% of consumers were convinced to buy something after watching a brand's video. Source: Wyzowl
  • Facebook users engage up to 5 times more with videos than static images. Source: Facebook IQ

So, we know video works, that consumers prefer it, and that it generates a lot of rich data. And despite this, only 21% of marketers are actually using video data to make better business decisions. Therefore, the challenge for marketers is to obtain as much high-quality data as possible and then leverage that data to shape our overall digital strategy.

Here are 5 video metrics that will yield useful data to do just that:


      Views are the number of times your video has been “seen” - and I put "seen" in quotes for a reason. With the exception of YouTube, where a view is counted if a video has been watched for 30 seconds or more, on Facebook and Instagram, a video only needs to be watched for 3 seconds or more to qualify as a view. On Twitter, a view is counted if a video is watched for only 2 seconds, and that video only needs to be 50% visible in your feed!

      I don't know about you, but that means I've probably accidentally "viewed" a lot of videos on social media without even realising it!

      Instead of looking at views as people who've actually seen your video and retained the information it conveyed, consider views as you would reach metrics. Reach metrics tell us the number of unique people who could potentially see our content.

      By considering views as our potential audience size, we can get a lot of useful insight:

      Audience Size

      First, views will give a good indication of audience size. For example, if you're only getting 12,000 views, then you will need to significantly expand your audience if you're going to achieve those additional 84,000 impressions required to meet your business goal.

      Message Dissemination

      Similar to audience size, views will also tell you how widely your message is being disseminated.

      Contextualises Other Metrics

      View metrics become very powerful when used as a baseline to contextualise other engagement metrics. Use views as the denominator in other measurement equations to assess video performance (which will be covered later in this post).

      2. Social Engagement

      Right Target Audience

      Social engagement metrics are going to tell you if you’re hitting the right target market - if you have a huge audience but low engagements, maybe you need to revisit who you’re trying to attract.

      Audience Affinity

      If people begin to engage with your content, you have turned them from being passive to being actively engaged. Comments, likes, shares, retweets, etc. are a good indication of how much of an affinity our audience has to your product or messaging.

      A/B Testing

      Social media platforms make it very easy to run A/B tests, so you can really get a feel for what kind of messaging or video content resonates with your target audience and continually optimise your ads accordingly.

      3. Play Rate

      The play rate represents the percentage of people who watched your video divided by the total number of visitors to the landing page or site where the video was hosted. Simply put, these metrics will tell you how effective you are in compelling people to engage with your videos. 

      Video Position

      The play rate reveals the effectiveness of the physical positioning of our video on our page: above or below the fold, to the left or right of the content, etc. Move your video around on the page to see which positioning performs best.

      Effectiveness of Copy

      The play rate will give an indication of how effective the copy around your video is in compelling visitors to press play and watch your videos for more information.

      Effectiveness of Imagery

      The play rate will also tell you how effective your imagery is - such as the video thumbnail - in compelling people to watch your videos.

      The insights gained from the play rate are crucial in helping to optimise copy, placement and imagery in order to generate those additional 4,200 clicks to reach your business goal. These insights will also contribute to lead generation because, if after watching the video people want to learn more, they will be more likely to leave their details and convert to a lead.

      4. Engagement

      Video engagement encompasses a few metrics that are important to note:

      • Watch time: the total amount of time that people watch your video
      • Average completion rate: the percentage of people who watch your video to completion.
      • Retention: the average percentage of a video that viewers watch
      • Average watch duration: the total watch time divided by the total number of video plays (including replays). Essentially, how long your viewers watch your video on average.

      These metrics will give excellent insight into how to best optimise your video content to not only be engaging but to also help drive qualified leads to achieve your business goal.

      Topic Relevance

      A high drop-off rate is an indicator that you're probably losing people’s interest, indicating that perhaps you should think about changing the content.

      Speaker Personas

      Low engagement could also indicate that you need to change speakers. Why not create speaker persona tests to see what resonates best with your audience? For example, someone using a casual vs. a more formal approach.

      Video Length

      Watch duration will give a good indication of the video length preferred by your audience. If you have a video that’s 45 seconds long, and people aren’t watching past 30 seconds, it’s a sign that the videos should be made shorter.

      Message Timing

      These metrics will also show where people are more likely to drop off, so you should get your important messaging across before that happens. For example, if a video is 45 seconds long, but people drop off after 15 seconds, the important takeaway message needs to be mentioned in those first 15 seconds.

      Optimising your video content to increase the completion rate of the videos should be the overarching aim; because the longer someone watches your video, the more educated they will be about your product, making them a highly qualified lead that your sales team would love to have a conversation with.

      See how international law firm Bird & Bird used video engagement data to shape their digital strategy and saw a 63% increase in video engagement.

      5. Conversions

      The last metric to cover is the conversion rate. A video's conversion rate is determined by the number of conversions divided by the number of actual views the video has had.

      The conversion rate is the crucial business metric that you're going to want to show management in order to demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts.

      You're probably familiar with the effectiveness of incorporating lead generation forms into your landing pages, but why not incorporate lead generation forms into the video itself? As previously mentioned, the best way to ensure you have a high-quality lead is to get someone to watch as much of your video as possible, so why not give those who watch your videos and want to learn more the opportunity to request more information?

      Here at TwentyThree, we tested out how effective lead collection forms were in generating conversions based on where they were placed within the video. Here's what we found:

      • 59% increase at the beginning of the video
      • 22% increase in the middle of the video
      • 2% increase at the end of the video

      Naturally, there will be more conversions at the beginning of the video rather than at the end of the video - but the quality of those 2% more leads was off the charts because they had sat through the entire video and wanted to learn more. These are definitely the kinds of leads your sales team would love to speak with.

      See how Universal Robots saw an increase of qualified leads of 50% in just 1 month by using lead collector forms.


      Let's quickly review how those 5 metrics mentioned above can be used to help shape your digital strategy to achieve your business goal of winning 8 new customers:

      Views: will indicate how much you need to expand your audience in order to get those additional 84,000 impressions.

      Social engagement: will help determine if your message is resonating with your audience and, if not, social platforms facilitate A/B testing to find out what does resonate.

      Play rate: gives great insight into how to best optimise videos, in terms of video positioning and copy, in order to compel visitors to engage more with your content and hopefully convert.

      Engagement metrics: by using the engagement data collected in your videos, you'll be better able to optimise your videos in order to reduce drop-offs, increase completion rates, and encourage more people to convert into leads. These learnings can also be incorporated back into the top of your funnel to optimise your TOFU campaigns even further.

      Conversion metrics: the more viewers who watch videos to full completion, the more high-quality leads you will generate. By adding a lead collector form to your videos, it's easier to capture these high quality leads to pass to your sales team, facilitating booking those meetings and closing those deals.

      By incorporating these insights into your digital strategy and constantly optimising your video content, you will generate more leads of increasing quality, helping you and your sales team not only meet, but likely exceed, your business objectives.

      You can watch the full webinar: Interpreting Marketing Data to Make Better Business Decisions here: