New Facebook Video Metrics: all you need to know

Great news for all businesses! Are you among the marketers who intend to increase their spending on Youtube and Facebook in the next half of 2014?

In May, Facebook raised their game and showed clear intentions of vying with Youtube for video ad revenue.

In other words, they want you to upload videos onto Facebook instead of sharing videos from Youtube. To encourage that, they’ve recently announced a slew of new video metrics, aimed at providing more information to Facebook marketers like you and I to better manage our video content.

What are the Facebook video metrics?

In the new update, Facebook provided 10 new metrics:

That was the first five and here’s the next five:

Which video metrics should you use?

Unless you promote your videos to only your customers, email list, and engaged fans, organic views are likely to perform better than paid views because when you pay to promote your video and reach non-fans, they are less likely to engage than fans.

With this in mind, I recommend you to make the following simple calculations when you look at the performance of your video content:

A. Percentage of organic views up to 95%

How to calculate: Lifetime organic views up to 95% (Unique users) divided by Lifetime organic views (Unique users)

This secondary metric shows you what percentage of all the viewers watched the video until the end.

With this definition, I made two assumptions:

• o
  • Watching up to 95% of your video is as good as watching your entire video

o

• When your video is played, the viewer is paying attention to the video

These are minor assumptions and should not bother you. But it’s good to always know that metrics do not exactly reflect what you think they do.

B. Percentage of paid views up to 95%

How to calculate: Lifetime paid views up to 95% (Unique users) divided by Lifetime paid views (Unique users)

This calculation is very similar to the one above so I will not dwell on it.

Use the percentage of organic view up to 95% as a benchmark for your paid efforts. I foresee three common scenarios:

1. Percentage of organic views up to 95% is far ahead of percentage of paid views up to 95%

When this happens, it signals a problem in your targeting strategy.

Your percentage of organic views up to 95% provides evidence of how engaging your video content is. The only difference between organic and paid views is the people who watch the video. Hence, you can attribute the difference to your targeting strategy.

You could start by targeting any of these fans, in no particular order:

1. o
   1. Existing customers

o

1. 1. Email subscribers

o

1. Fans

Then, you can use any of the two foolproof methods recommended by Dennis Yu from Blitzmetrics to find the right target audience on Facebook:

• o
  • Start from a smaller target audience. For example, start with one interest and include related interests systematically to widen the target audience while watching your ad performance

o

• Prune your target audience. For example, if you’re serving ads to multiple interests, duplicate that ad and reduce the number of interests in each ad. Continue to test your targeting options with every additional 1,000 impressions, which should ensure statistical significance in your results

2. Both the percentages of organic and paid views up to 95% are similar but low

When both secondary metrics perform poorly, turn your attention to your video content.

Similar to how you improve your photo posts, you should perform several tests on your video content to determine what works.

Because Facebook users have a short attention span when they scroll the newsfeed, you should not only ensure that your videos are short and engaging, but the thumbnail should also capture the attention of Facebook users.

Here are five examples of great videos shared by Anna that worked – take a look and pick up a trick or two.

3. Both the percentages of organic and paid views up to 95% are similar and high

This is absolutely good news but don’t stop there! Having just a few videos that perform well is great indication that you have hit the sweet spot, but long-term success requires more than just short-term efforts.

Now that you have a good idea of what works for your audience, are you able to adapt these concepts to drive engagement, conversions, and sales?

Having a high percentage of your viewers watch the entire video is an encouraging early sign but it does not guarantee a positive change in your bottom-line. But at least you are ready to take the next step – to build stronger relationships with your target audience and convert them into raving customers.

Where to find the video metrics?

In your exported Facebook Insights, scroll rightwards. You will find all 10 metrics listed consecutively from Column X to Column AV.

What will you do next?

Now that you understand the basics of video metrics provided by Facebook, how will you evaluate the success of your video content? Which metrics do you think are critical to your business?