Turn video watch-depth into a buying signal

Cheap video ads sorted by how much of them people actually watch, so retargeting spend concentrates on demonstrated attention — and once the videos on your own site are instrumented too, on named people you can reach directly.

When to run it

You run paid social and your retargeting audience is "everyone who saw anything." Lower-funnel CPMs are expensive, and right now that budget treats a scroll-past and a full watch as the same person. Meanwhile the demo videos on your own site play to an analytics void — you know the page got visits, not who watched what.

Why it works

Finishing a video is a cost the viewer chose to pay, which makes watch-depth one of the few paid-social signals that can't be faked by an accidental click. Ad platforms sell completion-optimized video views at some of their cheapest rates (Meta's buying objective for this is ThruPlay), so you can buy attention wholesale and pay retail only for the people who proved they have it. The same mechanism gets sharper on your own site: there, watch depth attaches to a person instead of an anonymous audience, and several deep watches in a short window reads less like browsing and more like a hand raised.

The play

1. Run video-view campaigns optimized for completions, not clicks. The creative's only job is to be worth finishing.
2. Build retargeting audiences segmented by watch depth — quarter, half, three-quarters, completed — and point your lower-funnel spend at the deep segments only.
3. Instrument the video player on your own site the same way: record starts, progress milestones, completions, replays, and shares, per person rather than per audience.
4. Define a hand-raise threshold: most of two or more videos watched within a week or so.
5. When a known person crosses it, act like they asked a question — a personal email or a booking link within hours, not a drip.

Ship it with Hogsend

Wire the player's progress into events (video.progress with a percentage, video.completed at the end), send them through the same endpoint as the rest of your tracking, and let the journey watch for the second deep watch:

import { days, defineJourney, sendEmail } from "@hogsend/engine";

export const deepWatcherHandRaise = defineJourney({
  meta: {
    id: "deep-watcher-hand-raise",
    trigger: {
      event: "video.completed",
      where: (b) => b.prop("percentWatched").gte(90),
    },
    // One outreach per person per month, however many videos they binge.
    entryLimit: "once_per_period",
    entryPeriod: days(30),
    suppress: days(3),
  },
  run: async (user, ctx) => {
    // The hand-raise is the SECOND deep watch inside a week.
    const second = await ctx.waitForEvent({
      event: "video.completed",
      timeout: days(7),
      label: "await-second-watch",
    });
    if (second.timedOut) return;
    if (!(await ctx.guard.isSubscribed())) return;
    await sendEmail({
      to: user.email,
      userId: user.id,
      template: "sales/watched-the-demos",
      props: { video: second.properties?.title },
    });
  },
});

Anonymous viewers still count — their watch events accumulate against the anonymous profile and fold into the contact when they later identify, so the threshold can trip on their first signup.

How you'll know

Two comparisons. On the paid side: cost per qualified conversation from the deep-watch segments versus your broad retargeting audience. On the site side: reply and booking rate on hand-raise outreach versus the same message sent to a cold list — the watch events and the sends are both in Hogsend, so it's one funnel.