If you read other creator blogs, you’ll get a nice mix of different ways to measure campaigns. It does ultimately depend on your own objectives as a brand, and what you want to get out of doing creator collborations.

There’s also many ways to collaborate - such as how you use paid media to boost the content so more people see it. Or if you’re a performance-focused brand, then you’ll want to drive site traffic, leads and sales.

But in the world of social feeds and algorithms, there’s one king of all the social metrics. Completion rate %. How many people watched the video from start to finish. It really is the only stat that matters, and all other performance hangs off this single metric.

Let us explain why. It all starts with the social platforms themselves and what their objective is. Every single social platform measures success by Time spent on the platform per user. The more time you spend on TikTok (for example), the more videos you watch, the more ads you can be served, the more money they make from you as a user. It’s a simple chain.

Now imagine the one tool they have to maximise this is their clever algorithm. It serves you content that it thinks you like. A good experience is getting videos you watch all the way through, a bad experience is constantly flicking up to another video because you don’t like what you’re seeing (imagine channel flicking in front of the TV - if you’re over 35). The more you flick, the higher the chances you close the app and do something else on your phone.

When the algorithm grades videos, it looks at whether people watched it or flicked it. If it gets watched, the algorithm thinks that’s good content, and shows it to more people like those people. If it gets flicked a lot, the amount of people it tries to show it to diminishes, until the algorithm gives up on that video. Some videos get watched more than once per person - even better, that’s really sticky content. Great content gets watched 100% through, never flicked (only once it’s started playing again). And that’s the content that gets really big organic views.

Now for paid boosted content. A simple rule. If someone watches it 100% through organically, they’ll watch it 100% when boosted. Maybe your paid targeting is a different audience, maybe you’ve boosted it so much that people see it 10 times. But the simple rule is - people who watch a video through don’t care if it’s boosted or not. It’s just good content.

Now for all the other metrics: Likes, Comments, Shares. These metrics do mean something to the algorithm, but very little compared to Completion rate %. The simple truth is, some videos will gain likes because it’s likeable content. Some videos make you want to comment. Some videos you’ll send to friends. But they’re all different types that garner different reactions based on the topic of the content.

The King of all metrics that all content has to achieve, is content people like watching. No matter the topic.