Out of the videos you’ve made so far, which one is delivering the best results?
It’s an honest question that executives and company stakeholders like to ask. Despite its simplicity, many video marketers aren’t prepared to provide an answer.
Your marketing, sales, and support videos are certainly making a positive impact on your conversions. But supervisors and stakeholders want more than your gut-feeling. They want hard data that you can use to demonstrate your work is delivering results.
For business leaders, it makes sense to find out which videos deliver the greatest value. The company budget is going to prioritize the best-performing types of video first.
The marketers who answer that question need to go on something better than video view counts, play rates. Measuring video marketing ROI requires gathering high-quality engagement data from users.
Video marketing analytics: Key goals for video marketing ROI
Choosing which metrics to analyze requires setting a clear goal first. Just like any other form of content marketing, your video content serves a purpose. Identifying that purpose tells you which metrics matter most. Here are a few examples:
Website SEO analytics
If your videos are primarily aimed at improving search engine optimization, your search engine rankings will obviously play a major role. To truly showcase the effectiveness of your video content, you’ll have to dig deeper.
One of the major ranking factors that video content improves is dwell time. Video content takes time to consume, which means users end up spending more time on your web pages. This can have a powerful impact on your search rankings.
Dwell time is an excellent example of a metric that you can tie directly to video performance ROI.
Sales analytics
Video can play a powerful role in qualifying leads and shortening customer time-to-value. These are two of the biggest metrics your sales-oriented videos are likely to impact.
Bringing better-qualified leads to the sales team is a compelling case to make. With the right video hosting software in place, you can funnel qualified leads directly to your sales team while optimizing customer messaging on a case-by-case basis. Better-qualified leads (usually the product of efficient lead-generation efforts conducted by marketing personnel) means less work per sale and increased profits.
In a similar vein, it’s easy to make a case for video content that reduces customer time-to-value. If your videos answer the questions that customers often ask your sales team, the entire sales process can move along at a far quicker pace. This boosts the productivity of every employee-hour spent on sales.
Marketing analytics
Marketing is all about engagement. The more time users spend actively engaging with your content, the more likely they are to convert. Click-through rates are traditionally one of the best indicators of good marketing analytics.
One of the most effective strategies video marketers use to measure the effectiveness of content is by measuring the click-through rate of related materials.
As long as your videos contain a call-to-action, the best indicator of video marketing success is the action you’re calling for.
If you are sending videos to users through email, then you will want to use the email click-through rate as an analytics metric. If you are pushing for viewers to fill out an online form, your form response rates are going to be the most important metric.
How to measure video marketing ROI on YouTube
YouTube offers a limited set of video analytics tools to its users. You can use YouTube to determine traffic sources for videos, and find out how many views come from each source.
This can be useful for gauging organic traffic – people using YouTube to find your videos. Your video analytics page will tell you how many views came from YouTube Channels, Suggested Videos, and YouTube Search. It will even give you an average view duration for each traffic source.
The main problem here is that YouTube doesn’t offer any individual user analytics. All of the metrics it gives users are aggregated, which means you can’t drill down to more granular analysis.
However, YouTube advertisers can implement view-through conversions for paid campaigns. YouTube lets advertisers track individual users who watch videos, reach the advertiser’s website, and complete an advertiser-defined conversion.
How to measure video marketing ROI on Facebook
Overall, Facebook’s video marketing metrics and analysis options are worse that YouTube’s. As of September 2020, Facebook does not offer any integrated referral tracking solutions for video content producers. Instead, it offers fan subscriptions and creator-supporting stars.
Facebook’s position on video monetization leans heavily on the mass-influencer model. Its video marketing tools are more concerned with demonstrating high viewership numbers than tracking off-site conversions.
Video marketers who insist on Facebook will need to utilize UTM parameters and Google Analytics to make up for the social media platform’s lack of integrated options. Even so, gauging ROI on a video-by-video basis will be incredibly challenging.
How to measure video marketing ROI using a video hosting solution
Purpose-built video hosting solutions allow marketers to achieve best-in-class user segmentation and analytics. By capturing viewer engagement data on an individual basis, platforms like Cincopa offer granular insight into each video’s overall conversion contribution.
Marketers who rely on feature-rich CRM suites to handle user data can integrate their CRM with video hosting platforms to enable time-saving process automation.
Marketers without a CRM can use Google Analytics to segment users and find out which videos are outperforming the others.
Invest in dedicated video hosting to prove video marketing ROI
Getting industry-leading video analytics from YouTube or Facebook is challenging and expensive. Proving video marketing ROI is not part of the core value they offer users. Video marketers who need to demonstrate that their efforts are generating results need to invest in a video hosting solution that enables this kind of data capture and video metrics.
