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Setting KPIs for Video Marketing

Getting started with videos is a tough gig, especially if you're a small business over. So we recommend starting small video marketing campaigns and setting reachable KPIs to ensure growth.

The information age has gotten so advanced that it has allowed companies to leverage big data to generate videos, with hopes to get the most out of their marketing initiatives.

Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar store looking for more foot traffic, or an enterprise-level software-as-a-service tool, chances are you’re using data and market research to help bring in more business.

With this post, we’re going to help you define key performance indicators, and discuss how you can use video to help your business reach new heights. The real key takeaway we’d like you to have is to make sure that you take some time to have good key measurables that help you drive your business.

A Quick Overview: What Are Key Performance Indicators?

KPI’s are numerical metrics that organizations track to measure their progress towards a defined goal. Organizations use KPIs at different levels to successfully reach their targets.

High-level KPIs will probably focus on the overall performance of a business — things like revenue improvement, annual growth, and relative market share. Low-level KPIs indicate the performance of departments and their respective growth.

86% of businesses use videos on their website, and 77% use it as a part of their social media strategy.

A quick example of a small KPI would be something like “improve the total number of unique visitors by x-amount/percentage every month.” With that goal, you’d probably look at creating new content, ads, or a different type of marketing campaign, that’ll allow your website to activate unique users.

Need a Better Definition of What KPI’s Are?

Here are some more definitions that’ll help:

Video Breakdown of KPIs:

Here’s a video breakdown by Virtual Strategist (@OnStrategy via Twitter) that breaks down KPIs even more.

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The Definition of SMART KPIs:

It’s important to have SMART KPIs, as they bring more clarity and structure to your organization’s key performance indicators. Here’s a quick run-through of SMART KPIs:

  • Specific — The precise goal that you’d like to reach
  • Measurable — How you’re identifying the goal
  • Achievable — Is it attainable?
  • Relevant — Does it align with where you want to be?
  • Time-Sensitive — When are you trying to deliver the goal by

Identifying The Right KPIs for Video Marketing

Marketing has evolved to a point where online videos are a requirement to compete in any market. In fact, 86% of businesses use videos on their website, and 77% use them as a part of their social media strategy.

So how should you measure your video’s performance? It’s really a matter of finding the ones that best align with your business needs.

If you are a brand that is looking for more exposure, the number of viewers/views is probably top of mind. If you want to improve conversion rates on a page, maybe a/b test a landing page with videos of customer testimonials to see if it’ll provide the sign-up boost you’ve been seeking.

The possibilities are endless, so find the ones that stick and make sure that you keep finding ways to improve with every video that you post. Here are just a couple of examples of different KPIs to be measured to get you going:

Example of KPIs For You Video Marketing Efforts

Conversion Rates

This is the number of leads or customers that were gained from a piece of video content. This depends on the goal of your website — end-goals can include: filled forms, subscriber added, purchases, etc. — and this is also one of the trickier metrics to track. It’s probably ideal to use a third-party service (like Google Analytics) that’ll help you see how videos lead to your site goals.

Video Engagement

How long the viewer is staying tuned to the video you’ve put out? This is the tell-all stat for your video efforts; as you’ll be able to see how a user engages with your video content, and even look at the points of the video where they dropped off or lost interest.

A Couple Of Tools To Measure Video Engagement

  • Wistia — this is for larger businesses.
  • Vidooly — online video analytics.
  • ViralStat — social video analytics.
  • Vimeo — can provide analytics, but only if hosted within Vimeo

Whether it’s a video series or an ad campaign, the more data that you have and can improve off of the better.


The Play Rate

Play rate is an extremely telling metric, especially for people hosting videos within their website.

Play rate is the percent of page visitors who clicked play and started watching a video on a page — This stat will let you know how valuable the video content is on a location — on a site or in an e-mail. If you need more info on play rate the folks at Skeleton Productions get more in detail in this blog post.

View Count


This one is a bit tricky. You always want to expand your reach and have the most amount of users viewing your content, but it might be more of a vanity metric that might not serve a purpose.

Just keep in mind that a lot of sites track views differently. For example, Youtube counts a view after 30 seconds, and Facebook counts a view for only seconds of readership.

Social Media Shares

Of course, social media shares are extremely important for boosting your video’s reach. Social media videos should serve as its channel, where you should consistently post videos to help broaden your company’s reach. And you can use better targeting to reach individuals in certain areas, have lookalike audiences, and more.

A Quick Case For Adding Videos To Mail

The number of businesses using video in email jumped from 36% to 46%, meaning that this trend is only getting stronger. That’s right, e-mails are now including videos, and these can be videos that you make in-house or using programmatic videos that can inject your ads into e-mails.


Services like LiveIntent already work with over 2,500 big brands to inject ads into popular e-mail lists. So expect to see ads from different brands on some of the newsletters that you’re apart of.

The number of businesses using video in email jumped from 36% to 46%

KPI’s for Video Marketing Center Around 3 Things

  • Attracting New Leads
  • Converting Leads To Users
  • Monetizing Users

Whether it’s using video ads to gain the attention of customers, using video on pages to activate a customer, or using video at the point of sale to obtain revenue, your marketing initiatives should center around improving those three things.

Video Ads KPIs To Improve & Their Definition

  • Cost Per Lead — found by dividing total ad spend over the total number of leads.
  • Customer Acquisition Costs — how much it cost to acquire those leads.
  • Impressions — how many feeds the video was able to appear in.
  • Cost Per Completed View — did the person complete the video.
  • Click-Thru Rate — if the person clicked the CTA or link to go to your page.
  • Recurring Revenue — how much revenue leads bring in from channels.
  • Traffic-To-Lead — how much traffic from ads are coming in and becoming leads
  • Customer Lifetime Value — Average sale per customer x # of times customer buys x average retention time (months/years)
  • Brand Reach — the estimated size of the audience you’ll be able to connect with.

You can get more granular in all the different ad networks to find bits of data that’ll help you make smarter decisions. For example, if you’re advertising Google’s Display Network, you should be continually looking at data pertaining through ad performance and optimizing spend to help with (CAC) Customer Acquisition Costs.

Things To Know About Video Ads

It’s important to know what to improve, look at the current state of video marketing, and have an understanding of what’s working right now. Here’s what we found on the web that might be able to help you out.

Online Video Ads Are Shorter Than Ever

The trend toward shorter content seems to be going strong. Businesses tend to have a high percentage of their videos under 120 seconds in length. Overall shorter videos have a higher completion rate than longer.




*The Rest Of This Study Is Here*

We advise that you keep videos less than 90 seconds, as they have an average retention rate of 59%, compared to longer format videos that only retain about 14% of viewers.

Or, you can follow Facebook / Instagram’s advice of making videos that attract buyers within 6 seconds — I don’t think these are effective for every business, but you don’t know unless you try.

Creating Mobile-First Video Ads

With 52% of all global website traffic coming in from mobile, it’s crucial to create video ads that are ideal for a mobile environment. It’s paramount that you can find creative ways to engage your potential users with stunning ads — as the more progressive, forward-thinking brands are already making their websites, ads, and even services mobile-friendly.

With 52% of all global website traffic coming in from mobile, it’s crucial to create videos ads that are ideal for a mobile environment.

Creating an intuitive and unique experience from every point of the customer journey is going to yield better results and drive more revenue for your business.

Increase In Ad Spend Means Personalization Is Key

Digital Ad Spend is going to hit $130 billion this year; this will mark the first time that digital media will surpass offline ad and marketing spend.

What does this mean for you? You’re going to have to invest in personalized video ads to succeed in today’s advertising landscape.

Go that extra mile, considering that Millennials and Gen Z consumers view personalized ads as something that’s expected, not just a nice to have.

Need To Learn More About Video Marketing?

Contact us via Twitter: @newtheorymia

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