Dec
2010
Business Video ROI: Don’t Complicate It
If you’ve released any video on your website or on YouTube, you’ve undoubtedly had your management ask you “Did it work? Was it worth it?” After you get that question, you are probably spending time in your video platform’s analytics system to see how you can measure success. If you follow YouTube Insight, for example, you might put together a presentation for your CEO around demographics of your audience, the “hot spots” in your video, how many comments, etc. If you look across the various video platforms on the web, they all pretty much do the same thing, albeit under different brand names and trademarks. A lot of them look sexy but…
Unfortunately, most video analytics are a waste of time
If your campaign is 100% driven towards awareness and buzz, then measuring your viral video using heat maps, audience demographics, view counts and comment streams might work for you. However, if you are like most businesses, you need to focus on the goal of your video. Business videos typically have one of the following goals:
- Create buzz or awareness
- Quickly describe a product, company, service, or value proposition
- Supplement campaigns by quickly describing the offer
- Establish trust with a prospect by showing customer experiences & testimonials
- “Wake up” or engage a prospect via lead nurturing or 1:1 sales
The good news is that the measurement for #2-5 are pretty well known by B2B marketers and it has absolutely nothing to do with video analytics.
The Secret: Measure video like any other web content
Whether you are using Salesforce.com, Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Google Analytics, or another customer tracking system, they all have standard funnel reports where you can see website visitors -> leads -> customers. Your job as a marketer is to correlate the leads and customers with the content they consumed to get them to that point. You likely have reports where you can see if prospect X attended a webinar or prospect Y downloaded an eBook. If there is a large correlation of prospects downloading the eBook and then becoming customers, you can justify success of the eBook. Do the same with video: If you see a better conversion rate on people watching the video and eventually becoming customers, it is pretty easy to justify that the video worked.
Ok, but how do I track it all in one place?
Videos are unique because they are often embedded in other content, and rarely stand out on their own. Separating video views from pageviews is often hard to do. Luckily, there are techniques such as using virtual pageviews in Google Analytics that allow you track video views and use them in your funnel reports. Most of the marketing automation systems mentioned above have Javascript API’s where you can do the same thing. Note: In future blog posts, I will do more detailed tutorials on exactly how to do it for each system mentioned.
If you have videos on your site, add a little Javascript to them so you can track them as part of your funnel. If you’re still looking to make your first video, have confidence that it is not the black art that most video platforms make it out to be. Keep it simple and always remember to throw away the beautiful videos that don’t work and keep the ugly ones that do.
Disclaimer: We at VisibleGains believe that every marketer eventually needs to understand detailed video analytics as well as they understand web analytics. Our product offers much more detailed analytics than video views. However, they are usually not necessary until you are tuning and optimizing your video content. If you are a rabid A/B tester, then you might want to dig into advanced video analytics after you make a few videos, but we suggest that you keep it simple early on.
Photo Credit: Andrew Magill
