Online video advertising is still in its infancy, with much growing left to do. One crucial piece for the rise of online video ads is deciding how to measure their effectiveness. Until there’s a consistent way to measure results, online video ads will continue to take a backseat to TV ads, and major brand advertisers will stay away.

A new white paper from BrightRoll, entitled “Audience Measurement on Trial: Online Video Metrics,” ^[1] looks at several surveys and finds confusion over how to measure online video results. For example, it cites a Break Media study of marketing professionals from 2012 that shows that there’s no single preferred metric for measuring online video. Click-through rates, actual product sales, visits to the brand website, brand awareness or recall, and video completion rates were the five most popular metrics, but even the top choice didn’t rate above 50 percent popularity.

In the white paper, BrightRoll makes the case that the most important measures are audience metrics. Calling them the lowest common denominator, BrightRoll says they’re the crucial baseline for measuring an ad campaign. It gives these three reasons:

1. Audience metrics are objective and easy to understand. The percentage reach for men 25- to 54-years-old, it says, means the same thing to everyone.

2. Audience metrics are a better measure of video ad effectiveness, BrightRoll says. Other popular metrics, including click-through rates or completion rates, are faulty because of accidental clicks and automatic plays.

3. Audience metrics create a foundation for cross-platform measurements. The measure means the same thing for online video or broadcast television, so it creates a way for marketers to compare the effectiveness of both and to plan multi-screen campaigns.

For more on audience metrics, including why sites with high reach have a low percentage of targeted unique viewers, download the BrightRoll white paper ^[1] for free (registration required).