There are a number of factors that contribute to a video ad's success. With these metrics, you can better track and control them.

It's a known fact that in many internet video advertising social circles, one of the quickest ways to kill a friendly gathering is with the conversation starter, "So, how 'bout them metrics!"  

Video creative, be it in-banner or in-video, is engaging, emotive and interactive. Targeting is getting better every day, letting advertisers be more selective of their audience and increase their ad exposure time for better branding. Even the production and deployment of video ads is getting sexier as tools for design mesh with tools for programming and content starts to integrate with commercials. Talks about campaign success measurement, however, don't seem to have the same exciting flair.

People like to discuss, and advertisers like to see, double-digit results that don't have a decimal before them, and unfortunately CTR (even "a very good CTR,") doesn't come close to showing the depth of a campaign's success. We all know that online metrics don't only exist to justify the bottom line, they also teach us how the audience and the ads interacted. Great metrics allow for optimization and help us better value campaigns.

New video ad formats and new metrics mean new ways to extrapolate the success story from the data. That said, there are a few very interesting metrics to pay attention to when running interactive video ads.

Foundation metrics
Any discussion about success should always start out with intended goals. Did you reach the right people? What types of frequency levels did you attain? Was your message in front of your audience long enough? Was awareness increased? What types of responses did the campaign elicit?

Having complete transparency to see where your ads ran, and who they ran in front of, is extremely important. Equally important is knowing your campaign's reach and frequency. These basic metrics give insight into the who, where and how of a campaign, but aren't specific to online video (they're actually staples of traditional media).

Better online video advertising through metrics
The what, when, and why of successful video ads comes down to understanding the interplay between creative and audience. In-banner video ads, as well as new types of in-video ads like overlays, bugs and tickers that spawn video upon user-initiation, can all be tracked and reported on in ways that help advertisers better see the peaks and valleys of performance.

Here are some metrics that give true insight into a video campaign.

1) "The Percentage of Video Viewed" metric lets advertisers see how much of a video users either saw or were exposed to. 

In-banner ads tend to play automatically when users navigate to a page. They're great for grabbing attention, and we've seen that some video can capture attention better than others.

In-video ads, on the other hand, only play video when a user clicks on the initial ad overlay. The overlay, which is situated inside the video stream, is extremely attention-getting (and when done with tasteful transparency and fade in, is not jarring). Once the video commercial plays, identifying the percentage of view through helps an advertiser learn how engaging an ad was and where in the message user attention waned.

2) "Time until First Interaction" is another great metric for video ads. Where the percentage of video viewed metric shows where users tend to tune out, this metric is great for identifying where in a video activation occurs.

Is the second when the kid in the new khakis kneels in the grass when moms choose Tide? Is it the second Samuel L. insists steps be taken to effectively remove the snakes from the plane when viewers decide to buy tickets? Or, is it the fourth time you're told where to put Head On that users press mute? By looking at the video and specific interactions that occur around it, better creative can be created and areas of audience interest can be capitalized on.

3) "Brand Exposure Time" is one of the holy grail metrics. In a recent interview about interactive advertising's "most critical issues," Alan Schulman of IMC2 said of cross media metrics "It's all about time spent." In that same interview, Sarah Fay of Isobar U.S. remarked that "we believe that time spent with brands improves all forms of brand favorability."  

Increased exposure time means greater awareness and lift, and for video ads in particular, it means more time to tell the story. Like "percentage of video viewed" this metric shows how long the message was in front of a user, but as solutions like Attention Targeting proliferate and video ads begin to get exposure time greater than the 30-seconds videos within them, advertisers need to see how much face time they're actually getting with their users.

Increased exposure, not just increased frequency, can have a huge pay-off with respect to branding and campaign success.

Conclusion
Great metrics tell insightful stories. For an industry looking to solidify success standards that speak to the effectiveness of video advertisements (beyond their ability to garner a click), the foregoing metrics say a lot about how the ad performed.

Most of all, these metrics are powerful because while new video ad formats and targeting solutions will appear, these metrics speak to the effectiveness of video in terms of when audience attention turned into action and persuasion.

Bradley Werner is the director of marketing for The Fifth Network. Read full bio.