Marketing on Facebook gives you the opportunity to leverage various types of content in your campaigns, including Facebook video ads. Research indicates that video is the highest-converting medium for social marketing campaigns. Thus, it should play an important role in your Facebook video advertising strategy.

That said, as with any marketing campaign, it’s still very important to track certain key metrics when assessing how effective a video ad is. Monitoring the following data points will help you better understand how well your Facebook videos are performing, making it easier to improve your campaign if it’s not meeting your standards.

You can run A/B tests on your video ads and pick the best performing video version to show to your audience. But how do you know which video performs the best? And what metrics should you consider? Here are 4 metrics you should be tracking:

View-Through Rate

The view-through rate refers to the people who viewed your video once it reached them. Mathematically, is the number of videos watched divided by the number of impressions (times a page loaded with a video). This metric essentially tells you whether the content a user first sees when your video reaches them is effective in catching their attention.

If you’re not satisfied with your view-through rate, you may want to make changes to the first few seconds of the video. You could also consider adding a more relevant description, thumbnail and title.

Here is a quick read on video thumbnails and its importance.

Positive Engagement Indicators

Don’t make the mistake of assuming everyone who viewed your video had a positive reaction to it. Simply tracking views won’t tell you with any degree of certainty whether a video is making the right impression on potential customers or not.

That’s why it’s also important to track indicators of positive engagement with the content. This includes shares, likes, comments and the shares, likes and comments on the shared posts.

Average Watch Time of Facebook Video Ads

According to one study, the average amount of time a user spends watching a video on Facebook is just 10 seconds. Obviously, the more time people spend watching your video, the more engaged they are with the content. Only tracking video views won’t give you the full picture; it’s worth paying attention to how much time the average person spends watching the video.

10-Second Video Views

Facebook lets you track how many times a user has watched your video for 3 seconds or longer. Unfortunately, because Facebook videos often play automatically in users’ feeds, this metric doesn’t give you the clearest picture of how genuinely engaging your content is.

Thankfully, Facebook lets you track another metric - 10-second video views. Seeing how often people watch your video content for 10 seconds or longer will let you know if you’ve succeeded in capturing your audience’s attention. This will also tell you if the audience you're targeting is the right one for your video ad or not.

To reiterate, the point of tracking these metrics isn’t simply to learn how to improve Facebook video marketing performance. Tracking key metrics like those listed above gives you the information you need to make changes to a campaign if it isn’t working. Monitor these statistics, and you’ll gain an edge over the competition!

Pulkit Jain

Engineer • Marketer • Tech Geek • Movie & Comic book nerd • Avid reader • Gaming Addict • Football fanatic #GGMU

More