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How to measure a street interview campaign

By the Street Interviews team · 28 September 2026 · 4 min read

Every campaign report starts with a big number. It is usually views, it is usually impressive, and on its own it says remarkably little about whether the money was well spent. Measuring social video properly means looking past the headline to what people did once they started watching.

Street interviews are particularly easy to misread. They can rack up huge reach with very little media spend, which is wonderful, but it can also tempt brands to stop asking questions once the view count looks healthy. The more useful approach is to decide in advance what success looks like and pick a handful of measures that reflect it.

Start with the objective

A campaign built to make a new brand famous should be judged differently from one built to change how an existing brand is seen, or one designed to drive sign-ups. Agree on the job before filming starts and choose the measures that match it. Everything else is context.

Reach and views: the starting line

Views tell you how many times the video was served and started. Reach tells you how many different people saw it. Both matter for awareness, but they are a measure of distribution rather than impact. Treat them as the starting line, not the finish.

Completion and watch time

How much of the video did people actually watch? Average watch time and completion rate show whether the content held attention, and they are closely tied to how much further the platforms will push it. A shorter video with high completion is usually a stronger result than a longer one that most people abandoned halfway through.

Shares and saves

A share is a public endorsement: someone put their name to your video by sending it to a friend or posting it to their own feed. A save is a private one: they liked it enough to want to come back. Both are far stronger signals of quality than a like, and both tend to predict whether a video will keep travelling.

Comments: read them, don't just count them

Comment volume is useful, but the content is gold. Are people tagging friends? Arguing about the answers? Asking where to buy the product? Repeating the brand name? The language viewers use in the comments is often the best copy a marketing team will read all year.

What happens off the platform

The effect of good social video rarely stops at the app. Look for rises in branded search, direct traffic to your website, follower growth on your own channels and, where it fits, sales or sign-ups over the following weeks. Tracked links and promo codes help, but the clearest picture usually comes from comparing these trends with a period when the campaign wasn't running.

Compare like with like

A number only means something next to another number. Benchmark against your own previous content, against the channel the video ran on, and against similar formats. A completion rate that looks modest might be excellent for a two-minute video. A view count that looks huge might be ordinary for a channel with millions of followers.

The short version

Decide what the campaign is for. Use views and reach to confirm it was seen. Use completion, shares, saves and comments to judge whether it landed. And look beyond the platform for the signs that it changed what people did next.

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