Using KPIs to assess the quality of a video edit

The art of video editing is one of the most mysterious arts of modern day, in the sense that we all consume lot’s of hours of video content, movies and shows for our enjoyment, tutorials and educational videos for our education and even unboxes and advertisements to spend our money to.

But how do you quantify the difference between a mediocre and a good edit?

To have accurate data, you need to show to an identical audience the same video in two different versions and gather the responses. Sounds impossible? In TheRacebox we actually had an “old video” lying around, already published and we decided to re-edit it.

Using the exact same footage but much better editing and thanks to youtube’s analytics, I decided to also make some KPIs to help me in my case study.

Old Edit vs New Edit:

The old edit is a pretty good edit on it’s own, the video is an interview of Kevin Cuoco who explains the challenges he faces everyday in his work and his advice on tackling mixed weather conditions on a race track.

The new edit was cut more tightly, making the interview 3.09 mins instead of 7.32, only by removing unnecessary pauses, mistakes and things that were told twice. It was also given a cover photo, nothing fancy but it really helped as we will see!

The KPIs:

Click Through Rate, this performance is mainly affected by the cover photo and the title of the video
Message Received, this “fancy” name is for the average view duration, divided by the length of the interview, thus showing which percentage of the total message was received by the viewers.
Viewers (percentage) who reached at 0.30s mark
Viewers (percentage) who reached at the end of the interview
End Screen clicks, this shows a happy viewer who wants to watch more videos from this channel
End Screen Clicks per 1000 impressions, I included this metric because in online marketing you can buy impressions but you can’t buy someone’s attention for such a long time. So the better this number is, the better the marketing performance of the video would be (if it was advertised).

The Cost:

Although hiring an editor sounds like a raise in budget, due to my expertise and speed, I was able to make the new edit 5 times faster than the old edit was done. Saving precious time and cutting down the total cost.

The Results:

We can see that not only the new edit, outperformed the old edit in all metrics. It kept much more people to the end of the video and these people were more keen to keep consuming video content from the same channel making them much more satisfied and responding better to the Call to Action (which was to keep watching TheRacebox content).