1 minute = 1.8m words. That’s how significantly more powerful a video is compared to the written word, according to Forrester Research. But just how powerful? 157% increasing in organic traffic to site, 105% time on site increase and twice the rate of conversion than sites without video. And considering that 70% of internet traffic will be video by 2021, it’s no surprise that video is quickly becoming one of the most critical components of the marketing mix. This dramatic growth has been driven largely by the global shift in audience consumption patterns from text to rich media, the disruptive changes in buyer behavior toward a self-directed, content-driven buyer experience and competitive landscape for the buyers’ attention span. Consumers are watching more video than ever, and businesses are recognizing video’s unique ability to drive business results.  But is there more to just clicks and views as measurement criteria for video? The answer is yes, and it is the power of video analytics.

Video analytics enable marketers to understand how their video content is resonating with the audience, by providing insights into how much of a video is being watched, what messages are being seen, and how engaging the content is.

But how can marketers use video analytics to not only determine the success of their video assets but also gain insights into buyer behavior that can influence their marketing strategy for the future? Here are some video analytics criteria for marketers to keep in mind:

Video Analytics Metric 1.0

There are two metrics marketers can use to assess video marketing performance: play rate and engagement score.

Play rate is calculated by dividing the views by the impressions. A quick review on those terms:

• View - viewer clicks play when presented with the opportunity to watch the video
  
  
• Impression - a video was loaded on a page but not necessarily played

When you do the math, you can figure out the percentage of time a viewer, given the opportunity to view a video, actually clicks “play”. This percentage is our Play Rate. It answers the question: “Are people watching my videos?”

Engagement score is the result of dividing a video into 100 equal segments (100%), and tracking how many people watched each of those segments. Reviewing this information gives insight to the specific moment where viewers may have jumped ship before completing the video. This helps to answer the second question: “Are my viewers engaged with the content?”

And here are the analytics that marketers should also consider:

Video Analytics Metric 2.0

Video analytics can go much deeper than plays and engagement score. For starters, Brightcove’s cloud based online video platform, Video Cloud, tracks all kinds of video analytics metrics across devices, destination and geography to measure interest, interaction and engagement. Video Cloud is also integrated with most of the major marketing automation platforms in order to provide marketers a view of video engagement levels at an individual tier. Video Cloud can provide marketers with granular level of detail - who specifically clicked, how they accessed the video, how many times they viewed it and how much of it they watched. Here are some of the criteria that deep dive into measuring video content performance:

• Geographic Viewership Data - Launched a campaign in India but unsure which cities or states are generating the most amount of views? Video analytics can provide useful insights into a selected country with drilled down details by geography, region/state, and/or city.
  
  
• Unique Viewers - What are the total number of unique video views during a particular time span, or the average, max and total unique viewers and minutes per day. Drill down in the views metrics to learn when customers are most likely to view new videos, the regions with the strongest viewership, and which videos resonate best or does not resonate with the viewer.
  
  
• Error Monitoring - You can measure performance by tracking the rate of buffering or failure to play video error rates. This is what we determine as the quality of the video stream.
  
  
• Browser and OS Trends - Which browsers are being used to watch video and what is the duration of the video watched across browsers? Which OS are most frequently used to watch your video, what is the length of video completion across all OS and determine if a video drops off more often for some browsers and OS than others.
  
  
• Video Engagement - Determine how long viewers watched each video, with percentage of views that reached the 50%, 75% and 100% completion mark. It is often said that the longer the video, the shorter the audience retention. But it depends on the nature of the content. If it’s a video ad, best practice is less than 15 seconds. If it’s a product demo video, the length can be anywhere between 3 minutes to 15 minutes, depending on the complexity of the content served.
  
  
• Top Domains - Track video players embedded on your site and other locations. The Top Domains report lists the top 1,000 domains that host your players, the number of video views, and minutes and percent of total views for that domain.
  
  
• Top Traffic Sources - View lists of the top referring sites to your video, the number of views and minutes viewed, and the percentage of your account’s total views.
  
  
• Adaptive Bitrate - Most marketers usually are unaware of this but creating multi-bitrate streaming feature improves a viewer's experience by delivering videos with the resolution and bit rate that best matches the viewer's connection speed. With video analytics, marketers can drill down to see which renditions of the videos were viewed the most and spot patterns across countries.
  
  
• Interactive Video Cues - Use interactive cue points within videos to gain insights into a buyer’s clickability with the content and clues into the buyer’s interaction. Examples of such interactivity include calls-to-action on the page, custom end screens, lead forms and related links.
  
  
• Segmenting leads - Relevant content targeted at the right consumer engages prospects more effectively. Therefore, the better the segmentation, the better the marketer’s ability to drive the next step in the customer's’ journey. To segment viewers based on video views, marketers can set up the following triggers:

○    Automatically send emails based on percentage of video watched, which page video was watched on, and type of video watched

○    Segment email campaigns based on whether a contact watches a video or not

○    Segment and personalize video content based on data provided from a CRM or form submission

Marketers can build out segmentation rules and applying them to nurture tracks, start to group and build themes around the content. To make the nurture and segmentation as effective as possible, carefully observe the viewer's behavior using your video and marketing automation data, and make tweaks to your strategy as you gain more behavioral information and evaluate campaign results.

By going beyond metrics such as clicks and views, marketers can get the full picture and gain impactful insights into content performance and viewer experience data. Video metrics are one of the most useful tools for marketers to determine the value of their campaigns. By using video’s deep analytics, marketers can go beyond mere views and clicks, and truly change the conversation from “budget” to “ROI” and ROI is where marketers truly shines.

By Antoine Bouchacourt, Regional Sales Manager, Brightcove