You may have already shared your video with the world, but for reasons that you cannot begin to understand just yet, you aren’t picking up all those clicks you imagined you’d get. Cue the head scratching. The good news is that as long as online video has been around, statistics, numbers, or metrics have been developed to get a better understanding on how much reach your video has, how many are watching, and how far you’ve really got them engaged. As we start off with the basics, we’ll show you how view count and click rates matter to your video and what you can do to get those numbers on the rise.
Before getting knee-deep in numbers and metrics, it’s important to identify whether you have pinpointed these very important details that come with creating a successful video.
- One Goal: What have you set out to accomplish with your video? This should define what, where and how you plan to make and then share your video.
- Your target audience: Who do you want to appeal to? How do you plan to do this?
These two elements will help you decide just what, how, and where to share your video. Now what are those metrics called again?
View Count
This is the most simple and straightforward metric you can find out there: your view count measures the number of views your video gets. This measurement comes in handy when you’re comparing to some other content you have shared.
Play Rate
This metric shows you how often your video has been played compared to how often it was shown. This is to say, it’s the number of plays divided by video impressions.
Are you unimpressed with what you have at the moment?
What to do
To try spiking your view count or play rate, there are a few elements you may want to consider.
- Your video’s location
Where your video is placed is also directly related to the importance you are trying to give it. If it is central to your message, then make sure you have it placed it front-and-center. If you placed your video on a website, embed it on the landing page, not on an additional page. If you already have, make it larger. You can even define the placement of your video on media sites such as YouTube. This article of ours shows you how to put your most important up first on your channel.
- Thumbnails
Make sure your video preview thumbnail is enticing and invites your audience to watch. More than often, a thumbnail that includes a person or figure receives more clicks. In addition, you can also modify your video’s caption to better show the purpose of your video.
- Sharing
– Share your video with your viewers through other channels: email messages and social media are good bases, but remember to share responsibly. This means modifying the text that goes with your video link so that fans that have access to more than one of your sites don’t feel like they’re being spammed with the same information.
– Share your video with relevant influencers or with your loyal followers that you can additionally ask to move your video around. This could create more unique views than those that you could create on your own.
– If you’re really interested in promoting your video content, consider using advertising methods that require payment (banners, ads).
If you’ve tried these before and find no significant changes, then you may want to ask yourself if using video was the best medium. But remember, its not just all about those clicks. You may have a good response to a video and have engaged users, without an extraordinary play-rate. The rule of thumb to any video you put out is making sure your message, tone, and method is authentic and remains true to your purpose. Then you apply video metrics. For now, metrics still can’t measure “authenticity”, but it can sure help for what is most important: standing out.
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