Most video marketing statistics are repeated without being checked; a lot of the numbers in agency decks trace back to nothing at all. So this is a shorter list than most: six figures Studio Forty Six thinks are reasonably supported, what each actually means, what to do about it — and two famous ones we have removed.
Around 72% of customers say they would prefer to learn about a product or service through video rather than text. That is a preference, not a law — but it holds up across surveys and it matches how people behave.
What to do: if you have a page that explains something complicated, put a short video at the top. Not instead of the text. Above it, for the people who will not read it.
Roughly 64% of consumers say they are more likely to buy after watching a video about a product. Self-reported, so treat it as directional. But it is consistent, and it is the reason product video became standard in e-commerce.
More than half of video views happen on a phone. This is the least disputed number here and the one most often ignored in production.
What to do: shoot with the crop in mind. If the film will live on Instagram or TikTok, frame for vertical from the start rather than cropping a landscape edit afterwards and losing half the composition. Burn in subtitles — most people watch without sound.
Indirectly. Pages with video tend to perform better in search, but the causation is murkier than the statistic suggests: video keeps people on the page longer, and pages people stay on tend to rank better. The video is not a ranking factor by itself.
What to do: use video where it genuinely helps someone understand the page. Adding a video to a thin page does not fix a thin page.
By around 19%, in the studies that measured it. That effect is real but it decays — it works because it is a novelty signal, and it stops working when every email you send uses it.
Video ads average around a 1.84% click-through rate, ahead of most static formats. Worth knowing, though the format matters far less than whether the creative is any good.
This article used to cite two figures that get repeated constantly and do not stand up.
The first is that viewers retain 95% of a message from video versus 10% from text. There is no credible source for it. It is usually attributed to a researcher who never published anything of the sort.
The second is that video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. It traces back to a single small sample from over a decade ago and should not be quoted as a general finding.
We would rather cite five defensible numbers than ten impressive ones.
None of these numbers say anything about whether your video will work. They describe a general preference for video over text. They do not describe a preference for bad video over good text.
The variable that actually decides it is whether the thing is worth watching — which comes down to having something specific to say and someone credible saying it. That is the part no statistic will do for you. (It is also why we built Ready to Roll: journalists write it, presenters say it.)
If you want to talk about what would genuinely be worth filming for your business, our Birmingham video production page explains how we approach it, and a cost guide sets out the numbers.