One recent article (from VisibleMeasure.com) suggested that 20% of users abandoned a video within 10 seconds of hitting play, 33% would abandon by 30 seconds and a whopping 60% would abandon the video before the two minute mark. Their claims are based on data recorded from 40 million unique video clip views. That’s a decent data set so we could assume there was some accuracy in their numbers. We would also assume that a reasonable cross section of videos were used although that is not stated.

With that in mind, if you have a video that runs for five minutes, receives around 100 views per day and drives 5 visitors per day to your web site – would you could call that a successful video marketing drive - is 5% a good conversion number?  What is important now is how many viewers dropped out along the way, and when. If all 5 visitors to your site arrived after viewing the full video, and 60% had dropped out at 2 minutes, that effectively means you have converted 5 viewers from 40 – now that is a good conversion ratio.

Of course, you could manipulate figures all day to make your conversions look good, or look bad. What is important is that this data from VisibleMeasures could make a good benchmark. If you have a higher drop off rate at 10 seconds, 30 seconds or one minute, that could indicate your video is not compelling enough from the start. If you get a sudden drop off, at a certain point, it could indicate that something in the video put the viewer off (you often see this when price is mentioned).

Benchmarking is important to any industry. If you can benchmark the videos in your internet marketing campaigns, you can better understand why they may not be working, at what point a video is turning off viewers, and whether or not your video is performing to benchmark standards.

This just simply proves that search engine traffic is still good today. And it doesn’t look like any other traffic source will pass the search engines any time soon.

As far as competitive intelligence goes, the best way to use this information is as a benchmark. If you are below your industry average then perhaps you need to step up your search engine marketing. If you are well above your industry average then you can take that as a sign that you are doing well at search engine marketing. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t improve.

There is more than one way to gather useful competitive intelligence. One way is to get your hands on information that you can use as a benchmark. It may not reveal anything about any specific competitor, but if it helps you better understand where you fall within your industry then it’s good information.

This is important information because benchmarking statistics are compiled from individual companies within a niche, but rolled up into an average for the aggregated whole. It allows you to measure you against the playing field.

With benchmarking, you can see whether you are above the average company within your field for each important statistic or below the average. Then you can tweak what you need to tweak to move your company in the right direction. Don’t overlook benchmarking when you conduct your competitive intelligence research.