How to Measure the ROI of Your Explainer Video
Most explainer videos are commissioned on a feeling and judged on a vibe. The client likes it, the team is proud of it, it goes live, and then nobody can honestly say whether it made a penny. That is a waste, because the ROI for explainer videos is one of the easier things in marketing to measure, as long as you decide what you are measuring before you brief the work, not after it lands. An explainer video is not a branding indulgence. It is a conversion tool with a job to do, and a job either gets done or it does not.
The category as a whole pays its way. 82% of marketers say video marketing gives them a good return on investment, and 83% say video has directly increased sales (Wyzowl, 2026). Those are the sort of numbers a finance director recognises. So the interesting question is not whether explainer video can return money. It is whether yours is, and how you would ever know.
What "return" actually means for an explainer video
Start by throwing out the metrics that feel like progress but are not. Views, likes and watch time tell you a video was seen. They tell you nothing about whether it moved the business. Real return shows up on your commercial dashboard: a sale that closed faster, a demo booked, a support ticket that never came in, a landing page that converts better with the video than without it.
The audience is already primed for this. 96% of people say they have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service (Wyzowl, 2026), which means the format is not a nice-to-have sitting on your homepage. It is a working part of how buyers decide. Your only job is to capture the value of the decisions it helps them make. If you are still weighing up whether the format earns its place at all, we made the fuller case in our piece on whether explainer videos work.
The benchmarks worth knowing before you start
You cannot judge a result without a sense of what good looks like. A few figures are worth carrying into the planning stage. 93% of video marketers say video has helped increase how well their audience understands their product or service (Wyzowl, 2026), which matters because comprehension is the thing most explainer videos are hired to fix. And 85% of people say they have been convinced to buy a product or service after watching a video (Wyzowl, 2026), which is the closest the industry has to a headline conversion figure.
Treat these as direction, not destiny. If your video is shifting neither understanding nor intent, the problem is the video or its placement, not the medium. The benchmarks set expectations. Your own numbers settle the argument.
How to calculate the ROI for explainer videos
The formula is the easy part. Return on investment is the value the video generated minus what it cost you, divided by what it cost you, as a percentage. Spend 4,000 pounds on a video you can credibly tie to 20,000 pounds of additional sales, and you have a 400% return. The maths never changes. The work is in the "value generated", and that depends on which key performance indicator you chose to chase.
So choose one before you shoot. An explainer video pointed at everything measures nothing. In practice the value usually lands in one of four places:
Conversion lift. The cleanest test there is. Put the video on a key landing or product page, run it against the version without, and measure the change in conversion rate. If the page moves from 2% to 3% with the video in place, that one percentage point, multiplied by your traffic and average order value, is the video paying for itself in a form you can defend in a meeting.
Sales influenced. For a longer buying cycle, track how many closed deals had the video in their journey. If prospects watch the explainer before a demo and your sales team can see it in the record, you can attribute a share of that revenue to the asset. It is messier than a landing page test, but for high-value B2B it is where the real money hides.
Cost saved. Return is not only revenue won. It is also cost avoided. An onboarding or product explainer that deflects support tickets or gets a new customer going faster is saving you staff hours, and staff hours have a price. Count the tickets that stopped coming in, or the calls that got shorter, and put a number on them.
Engagement signals. Time on page, scroll depth and bounce rate will not appear on a profit and loss sheet, but they are honest leading indicators. A page where people stay longer and leave less often is usually a page about to convert better. Use these to diagnose, not to declare victory.
Where explainer videos actually earn their return
A brilliant video in the wrong place returns nothing. Placement is half the ROI, and it is the half most people ignore once the edit is signed off. The obvious home is the page where a decision gets made: a product page, a pricing page, or a dedicated landing page for a campaign. That is where a clear explanation converts hesitation into action.
Beyond that, put it into the sales process so a rep can send it when a prospect goes quiet, drop it into onboarding, and use a cut-down as the hook on a paid social campaign. Each placement is a fresh chance for the same production cost to generate value. We built the Expend explainer to make a complex fintech product graspable in the time it takes a finance lead to read one email, and a video like that earns most when it sits at every point a buyer might stall, not just on the homepage.
Make one video do the work of five
The single biggest lever on ROI is not the numerator. It is the denominator. Spread the cost of one production across more uses and the return climbs without you spending another pound. A master explainer should never be a one-page asset. Cut it into fifteen and thirty second clips for social, pull a few seconds for an email teaser, embed it in the sales deck, and use stills from it across the site. With animation the logic is stronger still, because the same assets can be reversioned cheaply, which is part of why we lean on it for technical subjects like the 3D explainer for Henniker Plasma. One idea, produced once, working in a dozen places, is how a video that looked expensive on the invoice becomes the cheapest line in the marketing budget.
Frequently asked questions
How do you measure the ROI of an explainer video?
Pick one primary metric before production, such as landing page conversion rate or influenced sales, measure it with the video in place against a baseline without it, then apply the formula of value generated minus cost, divided by cost. The discipline is choosing the metric up front, not the arithmetic.
What counts as a good ROI for an explainer video?
There is no universal figure, as it depends on your margins and the price of the video. As a sector benchmark, 82% of marketers report a good return from video overall (Wyzowl, 2026). A more useful target is your own: any return above the cost of the production, tracked against a metric agreed in advance, has justified itself.
How long before an explainer video pays for itself?
For a high-traffic landing page a conversion lift can cover the cost within weeks. For longer B2B cycles it may take a quarter or two before enough influenced deals close. Because a good explainer keeps working for years, the payback window matters less than the total return over its life.
Which metric matters most?
The one tied most directly to money. Conversion rate and influenced revenue beat views and watch time every time. Engagement signals like time on page are worth watching as early indicators, but they are the warm-up, not the result.
Do animated explainer videos give a better return than live action?
Neither wins by default. Animation tends to return more when the subject is abstract, technical or impossible to film. Live action earns its keep when trust and real faces do the selling. The better return comes from matching the format to the job, not from the format itself.
Make your mark
An explainer video should be judged like any other investment: on what it returns, not on how it looks in the review meeting. If you want one built to move a specific number rather than to fill a slot on the homepage, that is exactly how we approach the work. Rune Films is a video production company in Leeds, making explainer and corporate video for businesses across West Yorkshire and the wider UK. Tell us the metric you need to shift and we will build the video to shift it. Made to be seen.