Video messaging glossary

Aspect ratio is the proportional relationship between the width and the height of a video frame, written as two numbers separated by a colon, such as 16:9 or 9:16. It describes the shape of the frame, and says nothing about how many pixels are in it.

Video bitrate explained: what Mbps means, how bitrate relates to quality and file size, and sensible settings for phone-recorded customer videos.

CTA stands for call-to-action: the button or line that tells the viewer what to do next. Examples for video pages, emails and dealership follow-ups.

Video engagement rate is the percentage of an audience that engaged with a video, but at least three incompatible formulas share the name: interactions over impressions, interactions over followers, and average percentage of the video watched. The formula has to travel with the number.

First touch attribution gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to the earliest recorded marketing touch in the customer's path, ignoring every touch that comes after it. It answers one question well, which channel started the conversation, and assigns all the credit by convention rather than by evidence.

Frame rate explained: what fps means, the difference between 24, 30 and 60 fps, and which frame rate to use for business and customer videos.

Interactive video is video the viewer can act on rather than only watch: buttons, forms, links, chapters or branching choices sit on or beside the player, so the decision the video is asking for can be made in the same place the video is played.

Last touch attribution gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to the final recorded marketing touch before it, ignoring every touch that came earlier in the path. It is the default in most ad platforms and reporting tools, which is why it shapes more dealership budget decisions than any other model.

One to one video is video made for a single named recipient and sent directly to that person, rather than produced once and broadcast to an audience. One sender, one viewer, and content that refers to the viewer's own car, quote or question. Also written one-to-one video or 1:1 video.

What personalized video is: a video made for one viewer, with their name, car or case in it. How businesses use it in sales and service.

Play rate is the percentage of people who loaded a page containing a video and pressed play, calculated as plays divided by page loads. It measures one thing only: whether the thumbnail, the placement and the copy around the player earned the click.

Retargeting is paid advertising aimed at people who already visited your dealership website or viewed a specific vehicle and then left without enquiring. Their browser or account is added to an audience list, and ads for that stock follow them across other sites, apps and social feeds.

A screen recording is a video of whatever is showing on a computer screen, narrated by the person recording it and usually with a small camera window showing their face. Dealership sales and BDC teams use it to show a stock list, a finance quote or a service estimate instead of describing it on the phone.

Send rate is the share of eligible opportunities that actually receive a video, and the share of licensed reps who send at least one in a given period. It is the adoption metric behind every other video number, because nothing downstream can happen on a video that was never sent.

Speech to text (STT) is the automated conversion of spoken audio into written words, producing a machine-readable transcript that can be searched, quoted, and stored next to the recording it came from. Accuracy is reported as word error rate.

What a video thumbnail is, why it decides whether your video gets played, and how to pick a frame that earns the click in emails and messages.

Transcription is the conversion of recorded speech into written text, stored alongside the recording so the spoken part of a submission can be read, searched and quoted instead of replayed in full. It is also called speech to text, or ASR.

Vertical video is video shot and shown in a portrait frame, taller than it is wide, most commonly at a 9:16 aspect ratio, the shape a phone produces when it is held upright. It fills the whole screen of a phone held the same way, with no black bars.

Video analytics is the measurement layer around a video: who opened it, how far they watched, what they clicked, and what happened next. In a dealership it covers both published marketing video and the one-to-one videos reps and advisors send to individual customers.

A video call to action is the specific next step a viewer is asked to take after watching, presented as a clickable button on the page around the video rather than a line the presenter says on camera. At a dealership the actions that matter are book, approve, pay and reply.

Video captions are timed text shown on top of a video and synchronised to the audio, carrying the spoken words plus any meaningful non speech sound. They let a viewer follow the content with the sound off, or with no hearing at all.

Video coaching is the management practice of reviewing the videos reps actually send to customers and giving specific, repeatable feedback on them. It treats a sent video the way a call centre treats a recorded call: as a real artefact of the work, not a training exercise.

A video codec compresses and decompresses video. H.264, H.265 and AV1 explained, and why the codec decides the quality and file size of your videos.

Video compression is the process of making a video file smaller by discarding the data a viewer is least likely to miss, so it can be stored cheaply and sent over a network at a practical size. Almost every video you record, send or watch has been compressed.

Video content for business: the formats that work for sales and service teams, from walkarounds to explainers, and how to plan them.

Video email explained: how to send video in email that actually plays, why attachments fail, and how a thumbnail plus link gets more clicks.

Video engagement explained: how views, watch time and clicks show who is interested, and how sales teams use those signals to time their follow-up.

A video form builder is a tool for assembling structured workflows in which an answer can be a short video recording as well as typed data. The person filling it in works through the steps on their phone, and the completed submission comes back as one merged video with a structured report beside it.

Video hosting explained: where your videos live, how a hosted page differs from an attachment, and what to look for in a business video host.

A video landing page is a single web page built around one video, branded to the sender and carrying the actions the viewer is meant to take next, such as booking, approving, paying or replying. The video is the page, rather than one element inside a longer one.

A video library is the central, searchable store of the videos a team has recorded and sent, held with who sent each one, to whom, when, and what the customer did afterwards. It works as an archive, a coaching source, and a record when a customer disputes what they were told.

Personalized video messaging explained: recording a short video for one specific customer and sharing it as a branded page. Why it outperforms email.

Video personalisation is the practice of making a video specific to one named recipient, so that what they receive could not have been sent to anybody else. The term stretches across a lot of ground, from a stock clip with a name merged onto it to a video filmed on the spot for one customer.

What a video player is, which features matter for customer videos (speed, captions, tracking) and why a branded player beats an attachment.

Video production for business messages: planning, recording and sharing customer videos on a phone, without a studio or an editor.

Video prospecting is the use of short, individually recorded videos in cold outreach: a rep records a video for someone who has not enquired and sends it to start a conversation. It changes the format of a cold approach, not the quality of the list behind it.

A video quality score is a number given to a sent video by rating it against a written list of criteria, so videos can be compared across a team and tracked over time. Often shortened to VQS. It is only as good as the criteria behind it, and bad criteria push a team toward worse videos.

A video reply is a short video recorded in answer to a specific customer question and sent back through the channel they used. Instead of typing an answer about condition, a comparison or a price, the rep records thirty seconds saying it and showing the thing in question.

Video resolution explained: 720p, 1080p and 4K compared, and which resolution to use for customer video messages on mobile networks.

Video response rate is the percentage of sent videos that produce a customer action, calculated as videos that got a reply, click, booking or approval divided by videos sent. It measures whether the video moved the customer, not whether they watched it.

A video retention curve is the graph of what percentage of viewers are still watching at each moment of a video, starting at 100 percent and falling as people leave. It shows exactly where you lose people, which no average can do.

Video SEO is the work that makes a video eligible to appear in search results: the page it sits on, the structured data describing it, the thumbnail, the transcript, and where the file is hosted. It applies to published marketing video, not to videos sent privately to one customer.

A video template is a reusable structure for a video message: an agreed shot order, the points to cover, a length target, and the branding applied to the page around it. The rep still films fresh footage every time. The template decides the shape, not the content.

A video transcript is the full text of everything said in a video, presented as a document alongside the player rather than on top of the picture. It carries no timecodes, so it can be read, searched and copied without playing the video at all.

A video walkaround email is an email that delivers a short recorded circuit of one specific vehicle to one specific customer, usually as a thumbnail with a play button linking to a page where the video plays. The rep films the actual car the customer enquired about.

View rate is the percentage of people who were sent or served your video and actually viewed it, calculated as views divided by deliveries or impressions over the same period. The number means little until you know what your platform counts as a view, because that threshold runs from the first frame to a full watch.

Watch time is the total amount of time people spent watching a video, summed across every view and usually reported in hours or minutes. It is the only common video metric that counts attention as a quantity rather than as a yes or no event.