How to measure your explainer video’s effectiveness
Written by Harry Flynn | 16th February 2024
Explainer videos present an excellent way to reach your target audience and teach them about your products or services.
They are a type of visual content that gets your brand message across effectively. After all, 83% of people prefer watching a video to reading instructional content in text or listening to plain audio formats.
Does that mean your job is done after posting your explainer video? Not really. For the best results, you need to measure explainer video effectiveness to identify the best-performing content and potential areas for improvement.
In this article, you’ll learn five key metrics you should use in your assessment. But let’s start from the beginning.
What's an explainer video?
An explainer video is an attention-grabbing short film businesses use to explain complex ideas in an engaging way. It is concise in its delivery, with its compelling visuals that keep the viewer hooked.
Compelling explainer videos are mostly used for sales and marketing purposes to simplify communication. Essentially, the main goal is to show potential customers why they should try the company’s products.
As they are, explainer videos are already powerful tools. But, it is still essential to conduct an assessment of their performance. You’ll see why in the next section.
Why measure the effectiveness of your explainer video?
As I mentioned earlier, when you assess the effectiveness of your explainer video content, you can easily identify areas for improvement. You can enhance your video CTA, video length, style, and subject, among others, based on your audience’s preferences. The result is content that will yield better results for you.
You can also leverage the results of your assessment to optimize your overall marketing strategy. As we’ve seen, when you measure explainer video effectiveness, after all, you get an idea of the specific content elements that work for your audience. So, you can double-down on the use of these elements to, hopefully, improve your other types of content.
For instance, if you find your explainer video CTA “Learn More Here” yields excellent conversions, you can decide to use the same CTA in your emails (without videos) to get people to your site. Since that CTA works when used in your explainer videos, chances are, it will also work when used in your emails.
Overall, when you measure explainer video effectiveness, you gain actionable insights that can help you improve your promotional strategies. With these enhanced strategies, you can reach more people and get them to take your desired action. The result is overall business success.
5 metrics for evaluating explainer video effectiveness
Several metrics can help you measure the effectiveness of your explainer videos. Let’s break them down:
1. View count
View count refers to the number of times your audience has watched your explainer video. It is an effective metric for measuring your video’s popularity.
You can boost your view count by tailoring your explainer video content to the preferences of your audience. An audience persona, or a fictional representation of your ideal audience, can help guide your content creation. You’ll also need to be more effective at distributing or promoting the content.
2. Watch time
Watch time is the total number of minutes or hours your audience watched your explainer video. More watch time means your audience finds your video content engaging.
Check your video analytics to find the explainer videos with the most watch time. If you notice that viewers sat through an entire video, then that could indicate the kind of brand content and format your audience finds most engaging. This can then inform your strategy with future videos.
3. Click-through rate
Click-through rate refers to the percentage of viewers who clicked on your video to watch it out of the total number of times it was shown.
The click-through rate reveals how persuasive your video is. To boost your click-through rate, make sure your video title, thumbnail, and description capture your audience’s attention and reel them in. You can use a generative AI platform to come up with excellent copy that aligns with your brand voice. Just insert the right prompts.
Also, use the appropriate keywords in your caption. They help ensure the discoverability of your explainer videos.
4. Conversion rate
Conversion rate refers to the number of people who complete a desired action after they’ve watched your video. The desired action may be filling out a form, joining a webinar, subscribing to a service, or purchasing a product.
This essential metric measures how your videos contribute to the achievement of the set goals in your content marketing strategy. It also shows the return on investment you gain from your action explainer videos.
To boost your conversion rate, make sure your accompanying copy is on point. Consider incorporating social proof into the page where your explainer video is found as well. So, if your explainer video aims to get people to buy your product, include testimonials of current customers attesting to the quality of the product. You can integrate a testimonial plugin to display them most appealingly to catch the attention of potential buyers.
5. Social shares
Social shares refer to the number of times your audience has sent the explainer video to their friends on social media channels. It’s a great way to determine how well your videos resonate with your social media audience and the impact they have on the sharer.
Social shares help you reach even more people who may be interested in what your business offers. To boost social shares, include social sharing icons in your emails or blog posts containing your explainer video. If your video was already posted on social media, make sure your captions are engaging.
In Closing
Explainer videos are powerful tools. They use visual storytelling techniques to explain how a product works. To optimize their use, though, you need to still assess their performance. When you measure explainer video effectiveness, you get valuable insights to inform your marketing strategy.
You learned five metrics to measure the effectiveness of your explainer videos. These are view count, watch time, click-through rate, conversion rate, and social shares.
So, go forth and start your assessment now. This way, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your promotional strategies and, ultimately, drive business growth.
Author's Bio
Harry Flynn leads the digital marketing team at Twicsy, a site providing services to Instagram users.
