Evaluating the Success of Your Video

In this video I’ll explain some of the different ways you can measure the success of your online video.

00:37 – What’s the point?
00:57 – Ways to Track Your Video
01:00 – Views
01:42 –  Click Through Rates
02:47 – Conversions
03:07 – Return on Investments

Producing a video is an investment of time and effort. Your video can be targeted at the right audience, say all you want to say and have great production values. But when you release it into the public, how do you know if it’s successful? How do you know what is working in your video and what isn’t?

Not being able to follow the success rate and response of your video, you are basically shooting in the dark.

Objective

The first step in measuring the success of your video is to clarify what it’s purpose is. Do you want to improve training? Do you want people to opt-in or sign up to your website? Do you want increased sales? Knowing what you want from your video will inform how to best track the success of your video.

Ways to track your video:

Views

The simplest way to track your video is by counting the number of views it gets. This lets you know how many people are actually watching the video. Unfortunately, the count won’t distinguish between unique users and also can’t tell you how engaged your viewers were.
Engagement rates can tell you a lot about your video, such as if the viewers are switching off and where, and which parts they are re-watching.
Video hosting sites, such as YouTube, give you a much deeper analysis of your views. If you follow the link below this video, you can find a news update we produced on video analytics. This will give you a more thorough look at tracking engagement rates on different web hosting sites. ­

CTR (Click Through Rates)

A popular web video strategy is to put you video on external sites, such as YouTube. And the aim is to drive traffic from YouTube back to your website.

A click through rate (or CTR) is the simple formula to show you how many people were referred back to your main website. This can happen through a link at the end of the video, or in the description area underneath the video. If you take the number of people who clicked on the link back to your website and divide it by how many people watched your video in total, you will get your CTR.

Let’s say you can see on the view-count that 1000 have watched your video. Through your websites analytics, you can also see that 100 came to your main website, via that videos webpage. If you divide the referral rate, by the total number of views, you get your CTR, which is 0.1 or 10%. The higher the CTR, the more people were engaged and driven to action from your video.

Conversions

A conversion is when the purpose of your video is achieved. For example if your video was designed to make people want to click a contact button on your website. If a viewer clicks on the button, that is a conversion. If you want people to fill out an enquiry form online, and they do, that is a conversion.

ROI (return on investments)

Another simple way to measure the success of your video marketing is finding what return you are getting from your investment. First, set targets that you want your video to achieve. For example, you may have produced a training video to decrease injuries. Once your video has been distributed, allocate a monetary figure on the success of your video. E.g. the decrease of days lost due to injury. Put this number against the cost of the video, to find your ROI.

The more accurately you track your videos, the more accurately you can measure the success and benefits of your investment.

If you want help tracking your web videos, want to receive analytics services or have any questions about developing your own video marketing strategy, please contact me. I’d love to help.