Internet video has begun to form a large part of the online marketing strategies of brands, businesses and bloggers worldwide. The potential for video content to go viral, its power to engage with universal audiences and its distribution simplicity has made it a necessity for any online marketing campaign.
So how do you know your video has actually become successful? How can you be sure using it as a marketing strategy is working for you? How can you track that it is achieving your marketing goals? The following article assesses how you can track your video marketing campaigns, and how you can do so for absolutely free.
Why Should You Track Your Video Campaigns?
Tracking the success of your video marketing campaigns not only helps to determine whether or not your video is achieving the goals you?ve laid out for it to fulfill, it also flags up problems and issues as the campaign is distributed on the web. The earlier you can spot issues within your campaign the quicker you can rectify the problem and put it back on track. Tracking your Internet video?s success also allows you to assess particular aspects of your video?s success, whether it?s analyzing if your video has generated higher levels of website traffic, or whether it has increased the popularity of your social media sites. By measuring and tracking its success in a wide array of areas you can clearly define if the campaign is succeeding or failing.
What Should You Track?
There are a number of areas that can be assessed in tracking the success of your Internet video marketing campaign, and what you decide to track largely comes down to what goals you?ve set out to achieve. However, there are always key sectors that video marketers should pay attention to. The following outlines the four main groups of data that video marketers should always be tracking:
- Viewership Success ? The fundamental piece of data you want to track is simply the viewership of your content. If your video isn?t receiving many views, it?s probably not going to be on the road to achieving your goals. It?s also worthwhile tracking where in the world viewers are watching your content, because if your video is big in the USA, but you only want to reach out to UK customers, that?s not going to be a huge success for you.
- Social Media Success - Tracking the success of your social media growth, and noting any increased activity with your social media profile, can provide good insight into the success of your Internet video. Such a social media growth spurt will indicate how many users are looking for extra information after viewing your video, and how many users feel connected enough with your brand to follow your social media profile.
- Traffic Success - Much like with social media, following the growth of traffic generation indicates how many users are looking for extra information about your brand, business or blog and watching your video. Traffic generation is extremely important if you?re looking to increase brand awareness and conversation rates.
- Conversion Success ? Conversion is perhaps the most important aspect of Internet video marketing to track if e-commerce is your top priority. The amount of generated leads that turn into sales as a result of your video campaign is one of the biggest indications that your video strategy is a resounding success.
What Software Should You Use to Track Video Campaigns?
The great thing about online strategies is the array of online software available to users for absolutely free:
- YouTube offers a fantastic tool called YouTube Insight that can give you (if you upload your video to YouTube) easy-to-access information on your viewership success. If you?re not a YouTube fan you can also use Tube Mogul to access the same sort of data.
- Facebook is now offering the most extensive social media statistics it?s ever produced. If your brand, business or blog has a Page on Facebook you can access a staggering amount of data from finding out if online users are engaging with your content to how many Facebook users are simply talking about your content to other users.
- Google Analytics is always the place to go for all data surrounding your traffic generation and conversion rates. Although the platform has just released an extensive and very expensive Premium package, the standard free tools available to users should be more than capable of handling your video tracking needs.
How Often Should You Track?
How often you track your Internet video marketing campaign is entirely up to the preferences of the individual and organization. However, the one aspect that really defines tracking frequency is the duration of the campaign. Once you?ve laid out how long the campaign intends to last, whether it is three months, six months or twelve months you can begin to create an effective tracking schedule. Arguably the more often you check your tracking results the sooner you?ll be able to tell when there?s issues to amend, but tracking too often could cause your results to appear unbalanced. As a rule of thumb a typical six month campaign should be tracked once a month, in order to portray the most realistic and most natural results possible.
How Long Will It Take?
How often data is tracked also comes down to how long tracking such data takes. If something takes a long time to do, it?s probably not worth doing every other day. Luckily obtaining the data discussed in this article takes mere minutes. YouTube Insights, Tube Mogul, Facebook Insight and Google Analytics data can be checked instantly and can be downloaded into an easy to digest and simple to print off format, which makes you able to spot trends and problems quickly. In fact, you can access all that data and have it physically in your hand in five minutes flat.
Summary
By tracking your video marketing campaigns you can stay on top of your Internet marketing strategies, and be able to make necessary changes to any issues straight away. Always remember what your video sets out to achieve. Whether your Internet video aims to increase your Twitter Followers and social media activity or to boost your online sales and improve web traffic. Only by tracking the completion of your goals, can you really assess if your video marketing campaign has been a true success.
About the author
Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK-based Internet video production company.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/10/18/how-to-track-video-campaigns
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