Video views: why they aren’t everything

Just like TV commercials, if viewers don’t like what they’re seeing, they ignore, or zap through other channels. This means that all our efforts went down the drown. Views aren’t everything, and we need to think about video metrics that give us further insights. Let’s go through them and see what really counts in the success of your video.

Video views vs. play rate

Video views are the simplest yet most misleading metric of all. That’s why we have the play rate to measure how relevant your video is to the platform in which you placed it. If you want a certain percentage of your target audience to click play on your video, play rate is the number you want to monitor. An extension to the play rate is the engagement. It refers to how much of your video they watched, and is expressed as a percentage. Average engagement, also a percentage, tells you how much of your video all viewers watched on average. This metric is useful to monitor how your audience as a whole watched, re-watched and stopped watching your video.

Video views vs. feedback

The final key metric is feedback on your video. In brief, it is how viewers react to and comment on your video content. We use this metric to improve the content each time. Don’t forget, data is not just in numbers, but involves feelings and reactions. You can have hundreds of comments, but if the majority is negative, then you’ve accomplished nothing but on the contrary, spread negative word of mouth. Even when it comes to social media sharing, make sure your video is being shared with a positive caption to go with it.

Aside from these criteria, any other metrics you think we should have mentioned? If so, let’s discuss.