The Top 10 Performance Metrics for Creative Content

Fact: businesses love metrics. After all, what’s the point of spending money on something if you can’t tell how well it’s performed?

This goes for all areas of business, and that includes creative content. It’s going to be hard to justify blowing a few grand on an explainer video if you don’t have anything to show for it.

But measuring the performance of things like video, illustrations and branding can feel impossible if you don’t know where to start. Just what should you be measuring? Which metrics tell you what you need to know?

In this article, we’re going to talk you through some performance metrics for key content types to get you started.

Branding performance metrics

The importance of branding really can’t be overstated. We all know that building a solid, recognizable brand is an integral part of business success. Strong brand awareness can do pretty amazing things for you, from driving traffic and conversions to making it easier to find staff!

Professional brand design is a massive part of this. For example, an awesome logo and a well-crafted visual identity are essential and can take your business to the next level.

Annoyingly though, it can be really hard to measure the impact of a rebrand, meaning businesses choose to spend money on other, more tangible assets. But it doesn’t have to be like this. There are certain marketing metrics that will help you analyze the performance of brand design over time:

New visitors

Rebranding your business is a big task, and is often done with the goal of driving brand awareness so you can get more customers (and revenue).

A good way to see how successful a rebrand has been is to see if there’s an increase in new visitors. If this number goes up in the months following a rebrand, you know that your efforts have been a success and you’re attracting new customers to your site!

You’ll need to measure this over a set period of time – probably at least a few months – before you can see the full impact. This is because branding is a long play, so you won’t necessarily get immediate results.

Visitor loyalty

Okay, so you’ve got some new visitors – but are those visitors coming back?

Visitor loyalty tells you this and is another great metric to measure, as it also lets you see how a rebrand has affected existing customers. Making customers happy is one of the core customer strategy principles – leading to loyalty. 

After all, the more loyal your customers are the better, as it’ll also increase another favorite metric – the customer lifetime value. 

Obviously increased loyalty is always great anyway, but ideally, you’d want to see this go up after a big rebrand.

Conversion rate

You should always be keeping an eye on conversion rate anyway, but it’s an obvious one to check after a brand re-design. Is your new branding more effective at driving conversions than the old branding?

Video performance metrics

Video content has been proven to drive engagement and improve conversion rates, but you need ways of tracking whether or not this is happening. Here are some of the metrics you can use:

View count

The view count is the most basic metric of all for video content, and it can be used to figure out the reach of videos you post on social media and YouTube. If your goal is increased exposure and brand awareness, it’s one to keep an eye on.

That said, there are more important things than views alone, so don’t put a huge amount of stock in this. There are better metrics for showing how effective your video content is.

Engagement & View-through rate

The first of these tells you how much of your video someone watched, whilst the second shows how many people watched the whole thing.

Both these metrics are more telling than views alone – you only have to watch 30 seconds of a video on YouTube for it to count as a view, or 3 seconds on Facebook.

Engagement tells you when people stop watching in more detail, meaning you can optimize your content. For example, if you find people are dropping off before the end of the video, it could suggest your video isn’t particularly interesting, and that changes need to be made.

Equally, it could tell you that they’ve found the information they want early on in the video and that perhaps the video could be shorter!

Obviously, if you’re getting a high view-through rate, that’s fantastic and you haven’t got much to worry about.

Bounce rate & time on page

Landing pages are a great place to put content like explainer videos, and simple metrics like bounce rate can tell you how well they’re working. Bounce rate is what percentage of your visitors leave your site after visiting just one page.

Ideally, you want this to be as low as possible – you don’t want everyone running for the hills the second they go on to your website! You can use video content to engage your customers more and keep them on your site for longer.

Time on a page can also be useful – if people are watching your video, you’ll see time on page increase.

Illustration performance metrics

Illustrations can really boost your business, and bring a polished, unique look to your website, ads, and social campaigns. There are less obvious ways for figuring out how effective they are, but they do exist.

Often you’ll have to measure based on off-site performance – for example, how well infographics perform on social media, or how custom illustrations improve your paid ads.

Shares & engagements

Illustrations are perfect for social media, as they add a unique touch to your posts. Seeing how often your post gets liked or shared is one of the simplest ways of analyzing your social media success, and it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Click-through rate

Click-through rate or CTR is perfect for illustrations on paid ads. Quite simply, it shows how many people are clicking on your ad and going to your website.

You can set up an A/B test, with one version of the ad sent out with stock images, and the second version with your custom illustrations. By comparing the CTR of these two versions, you can see whether illustration is a worthwhile investment for your campaigns.

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Want to start analyzing performance? Then get some content! Find graphic designers, animators, and more on Twine, and choose from our best creatives.