Completion rate

Completion rate is the percentage of people who started a video and reached its end. It is sometimes called view-through rate, particularly in advertising, where it describes the same idea.

It is the most honest quick measure of whether a video worked, because finishing something is a decision the viewer makes repeatedly. Every second of a recording is an opportunity to leave, and a high completion rate means the viewer kept choosing not to.

The number is strongly determined by length, which is why comparing completion rates across videos of different durations tells you almost nothing. A two-minute video with sixty per cent completion and a twenty-minute video with sixty per cent completion are not comparable achievements. Compare a video against others of similar length and purpose.

In sales contexts completion is often more useful as a per-person signal than as an average. Knowing that forty per cent of viewers finished is a content insight; knowing that this particular prospect finished is a reason to call them today.

What counts as good depends on what the video is for. A short prospecting message that half the recipients finish is doing well; a training recording that only half the team finishes is a problem, because those people now have a partial understanding of something they are expected to know. Read the number against the purpose rather than against a benchmark.

Check the denominator too. Some platforms compute completion against everyone who loaded the page and some against everyone who pressed play, and on a page that does not autoplay those are very different populations. A sudden improvement after a settings change is often the denominator moving rather than the audience.