When you considered online video marketing for your campaign, you could not have made a better decision. Indeed this is not just a way of adding some oomph to your digital marketing portfolio. It goes far in translating viewership into a sales funnel, and a load of converting leads to back your marketing strategy.
Your videos hitting viral status is not the only measure of success. You need tangible evidence to quantify such online video success or lack of it. Such success matters as a marketing strategy because videos attract a wide audience. Consider that the Digital Marketing Institute suggests that about 45% of online users view online videos daily.
Every successful campaign needs evaluation and tweaking to get the most bang out of it. This article guides you on how to review and measure the success of your engaging online videos. You will also find tips that give insights on how to achieve and sustain that success.
Length of Time the Video Was Played
You’re not just looking for view counts, those may be skewed. Your focus should be on the length of time someone watches your video. If you 7+ minute videos and you get many people watching either the entire video or most of it, you’ve struck gold.
Why not focus on view counts? Here’s the thing:
A view count sums up the number of times someone has watched your video. View counts vary depending on the platform you uploaded your video. Instagram and Facebook give 3 seconds as sufficient to qualify as a view. YouTube calls for 30 seconds.
Fair enough. Your videos are engaging to go beyond such stints. Note, though, that such metrics on viewership can deceive you. You should critique such analytics by considering that probably a viewer clicked on your video link by mistake and watched it for the mandatory 3 seconds. How would you know that?
Did that viewer commit to your end goal of committing to a purchase? For that reason, view counts without conversions do not reflect success for your campaign. You would only consider this metric for success if you only wanted to make your video viral to accumulate view count.
If your video runs for 7 minutes and your viewers are only watching an estimated duration of 1 minute, there’s trouble in paradise. Keeping in mind that some platforms qualify that minute as a legitimate view, you now realize the deception of viewership metrics.
When such problems assail you, one way would be to engage your viewers to eliminate anything repulsive in your content. Alternatively, you can use internet resources to enhance the profiling of potential viewers and attract the correct visitors to your videos.
As you embark on creating your videos or reviewing their success rate, note that viewers ignore salesy videos that focus on brands. If you analyze adverts on TV, you will notice that the most successful ones are based on stories.
Such stories strike a personal note with viewers and hold emotional appeal, an important aspect of digital marketing. Buffer Marketing Library highlights the impact of storytelling on the Budweiser Chicago Cubs World Series victory.
The video captured the voice of legendary broadcaster Harry Caray, who was the spokesperson of the cubs till his demise. Budweiser had a video created merging excerpts of Caray’s voice with footage of the Chicago Cubs’ victory and subsequent celebrations held in Chicago.
The video culminated from a blend of brand equity, history, and the emanating nostalgia to connect with fans across the world. This video was a phenomenal success receiving the wide press coverage and shares on social media you crave for your videos.
You may not be able to mimic that. Still, you can focus your efforts on the type of videos that get the most favorable reception on viewership.
Curata identifies effective videos types as:
- Demonstration videos- 49%
- Tutorial videos – 50%
- Customer testimonials – 50%
Another way around this would have you seeking out other brands and marketing or social media influencers for collaborations.
Click-through Rate (CTR)
If you want to know how far your viewers will walk with you, include a call to action (CTA) option to gauge the inroads you have made. The CTR quantifies the number of viewers who agree to click on your CTA.
Often the CTA comes towards the end of the video. A high CTR should light up your sky. It means that some of your viewers remained intrigued by your content till its end. And getting to the CTA now requires your viewer to take some time and do something for you.
Is that just awesome for you, or is it a long shot? If your site visitors oblige you by following through with any other tasks you created for your CTA, then you’ve hit pay dirt. Indeed, this is a confirmed way of knowing that not only did your audience watch your content, but they found it worthwhile, so your video was a hit.
Calls to action do not necessarily require a purchase or sign up. Video CTA’s that will grow and sustain your viewership invite your viewers to engage in the following click actions:
- Follow or like your page
- Check out other related content on your page
- Comment on your video
- Subscribe to your channel
- Share your content with friends
You don’t have to wait for the end of your video to place your CTA. You can place them at the very beginning, which allows every visitor to see them. That helps in case the visitor doesn’t watch the whole video.
Mid-roll calls to action interrupt viewing and require a response to continue viewing the content. Your content must remain sufficiently engaging to have the viewer hanging on for the mid-roll or post-roll CTA.
Unique content attracts interest, no doubt. But how do you jingle your creative bug to harness CTR? You might consider a special angle such as the use of sound, or lack of it. 85% of the video views on Facebook, as Sahil Patel on Digiday intimates, occur on videos with the sound off.
So, is your video still a hit with or without sound? If your content can communicate even without sound, then it has hit the mark for success. To build on this aspect, consider optimizing your videos with impeccable subtitles or an array of text-heavy descriptions. Throw in some award-winning visuals and wait for the silent watchers to start streaming in.
Real-Time Views Report
Real-time views report is a section found in Google Analytics that allows you to track the activity on your website as it unfolds. It monitors the digital footprints of your viewers and their reactions to your content.
This feature works best in getting short term reports. Still, it also gives you an overview of activities on your website at any given time. With it, you can keep a tally of the number of visitors on your site, the pages creating the most interest for them, and the general traffic directed to your page.
With this feature, you can profile your page viewers on account of:
- Age
- Location
- Nature of content and events that draw them to your videos
With such information, you can reliably focus on creating more videos of similar nature of reviewing the ones online for better conversions.
You can access this feature effortlessly on your web page by using a short cut button found at the top corner of the report. It also allows you to customize your reports to filter and collect only the data you require for analysis of your marketing campaign.
When you combine this with search optimization and web crawling, you can gather insights on trending aspects of your brand and capitalize on them. You can also use the option to run real-time tests of various options for your website. The results of such tests flow in real-time. For that, you drastically eliminate errors and losses of unfocussed video campaigns.
Comments, Likes, and Dislikes
I don’t know if you prefer getting good news or the bad news first. Chances are, however, that both will hit you simultaneously with your online videos’ venture. That’s because you should expect your videos to attract both positive and negative reactions.
Your viewers will hit the ‘like’ button if they feel your video is wonderful. That being the positive reaction you seek, you should take the like to mean that the video resonates with your viewers’ needs and values.
The bad news is some viewers won’t bring out the orchestra for you to celebrate your video. They’ll see it as utter nonsense and hit the dislike button with gusto. How do you interpret such negative reactions? Did the viewer dislike the content or just disagree with it? You need to dig further.
The comments section creates a connection between you and your viewers. Such communication changes your status from an impersonal webmaster to a concerned and approachable entity. The emotion that the act elicits from your viewers gradually converts into a following and conversions start streaming in.
Create time to engage your viewers by acknowledging their feedback and sentiments. The comments section also helps your viewers interact among themselves on your platform. Such camaraderie around your brand can hold great insights for you as you sift through the conversations.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is a percentage figure attained by dividing the number of conversions in a specific period by the total number of viewers or visitors who visited your page then. Your objective should focus on getting a high rate, which shows that you are successfully meeting your visitors’ needs.
A low conversion rate shows that your web visitors have an unpleasant user experience on your website. To allay this, you must exploit avenues of engaging with your visitors and getting their feedback to improve their user experience.
To build on this, focus on the relevant audience for your videos. If you throw your videos on sites where they raise no interest, you might as well be chatting up a brick wall. Content needs and approaches are as variant as the audience on criteria like geographical location, age, gender, and language.
For that reason, customize your content for specific viewers. Make use of web crawling or web scraping tools to collect and analyze such demographics. The last thing you need for your efforts is being called out by social media administrators for spamming. Facebook, fortunately, has a fairly simple process of selecting target viewers for your videos.
Another consideration here is that you should optimize your video content for search engines so that it can rank high and appear in searches. Consider getting appropriate keywords in your video’s title and its description.
Besides, consider a strong and enticing call to action to induce your visitors to build your click-through rate. It would be a wise investment of skill and resources towards ensuring the accessibility of your videos on a variety of devices and gadgets without compromising on their quality. Conversion rates only increase when you meet your viewers’ needs.
Conclusion
Online videos will continue to sustain their lead on the list of successful digital marketing strategies. How you approach and manage this process will make or break your marketing campaign and your brand’s success. The process equally requires you or your marketing team to set smart goals towards making the most of videos on your landing pages or your viewership channels.
As you embark on your KPI analysis, it will soon come to your attention that the exercise requires some level of skill, rather advanced actually. It might require you to outsource the task to a KPI measurement and analysis expert.
The expert will guide you in configuring your video to the ever-fluid social media algorithms. With such assistance, you will be able to adapt your online video marketing strategies to align with the prevailing digital landscape.
Invest in appropriate Key Performance Indicators depending on the media platforms you intend to utilize to reach your potential audience. And as you work with those indicators, note that this is a game of precision. Only concise analytics and compelling videos will get you reliable results.
