Enterprise video metrics a must to measure success
Increasingly, companies have turned to video for customer service, product demos and branding. But they need to measure success with enterprise video metrics.
Reaching customers with immediacy gets more difficult every day. Attention spans have become shorter and companies have to wade through a pile of competing signals to get customers' attention. Some companies have found that video can cut through the white noise and create a more immediate signal that customers can grab on to.
Video is effective because only 7% of all communication is verbal; 93% is conveyed through inflection, body language and tone. In 2014, Cisco found that 64% of all Internet traffic came from some form of video and projected it to increase to be 80% by 2019.
With these kinds of numbers, experimenting in video for product demos, customer service and other enterprise uses makes sense -- with some caveats. Your company may have dabbled in a how-to training video to address common complaints on your help desk or you may have used video to expose viewers to your brand and bolster trust in your company. These are valid ways to strengthen your brand and enhance customer service, but using enterprise video metrics to gauge view count and drop-off rates will help you determine whether video is hitting its true potential.
The value of enterprise video metrics
You need to have a plan for each video you produce. A video without a purpose is forgettable.
This is why every video you produce needs to have a clear answer to two very important questions:
Who is your target market?
What is the goal you're trying to achieve?
Once you have those two elements defined, you can begin measuring the success of your video. Wistia has outlined how to interpret enterprise video metrics. In "Wistia's Guide to Video Metrics," it gives insight into what each metric means. They define eight unique metrics for measuring the success of video:
View count
Engagement
Social
Conversations
Play rate
Site metrics
Comments
Trust
Chances are you won't focus on only one, so prioritize these eight to align with your goals.
By using this empirical data, you can better organize your content to reflect your business goals or objectives. Let's walk through common scenarios: If you are an IT manager, you may want to send an instructional video to help increase the success rate of a systems update next week. Although view count is a logical metric to monitor, consider user engagement. This metric better evaluates whether users are watching the video in its entirety or they are clicking and closing.
“You need to have a plan for each video you produce. A video without a purpose is forgettable.”
Maybe your company is just breaking into social media and wants to encourage new website visitors. Instead of tracking the views on the video or the likes it is generating, see if your website received an increase in traffic and bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, your prospects may be having trouble finding what they're looking for. Or if site traffic increases once viewers get past the homepage, new customers might be investigating your brand.
These might sound like good metrics, but what if you can't track them directly? Sometimes you don't need a computer to tally a metric. For example, if you're trying to gauge "user engagement," but don't have software that can generate an engagement graph, try adding a call to action at the end of your video. Have a simple, anonymous, single question that appears below your video. Most customers who finish the video won't mind making an extra mouse click and their responses can be tracked against total views. If you have 100 views and 20 responses, chances are 20 people watched your video in its entirety. You can also host the video on its own Web page and track the average duration with a free application such as Google Analytics. Is your average page visit two minutes with a three-minute-long video? Then the average viewer is only watching two-thirds of your video.
Defining and tracking video metrics ahead of time will also give you better clarity when calculating your rate of return at a later time. Video production costs money and your ultimate goal is to regain and increase that investment for the company. The ability to show the impact, uplift or desired response will give value to the video or video series you produce. Keep track of production cost and hours, then compare them against the metrics you defined to see the true cost, or reward, of your video.
