How to Measure Effectiveness of Video Content

Video has been evolving as a popular marketing medium with smartphones and YouTube making video creation and distribution relatively easy. However, marketers are struggling to quantify the results and gauge the return on investment of video content. Just imagine a scenario wherein you have invested more than a day creating a video and it couldn’t bring you more than 100 views. Then you have to revamp the video creation and marketing strategy to get more eyeballs. The measurement has to be perfect so as to realign the video content to make it more effective.

A general informational video used for product demos can be coupled with a marketing automation software to get more insights into the number of visitors. It can also make its way into an email campaign and the open rate can be tied to the video and its effective use in the mail. Many times, the prospect just hits the play button and stops it before the finish. These metrics add to revamp your video marketing strategy. Based on the leads who watched a specific type of video, you can plan the nurture campaign accordingly and pass on the hot leads to your sales team.

Though the views and count of followers fall under soft metrics, they give a clear picture measurement of ROI. You can calculate the impact made by the video by checking on website views, engagement, clicks on specific links and other brand impressions before the release of the video and check the spike in the traffic after the launch of the video.

To reach a proper understanding of the utility of your video content, you have to learn the objectives at different stages of the prospect’s journey and the videos that aid them and then gauge your success.

Here are the metrics to measure effectiveness of video content:

1. Add Call-to-action Links

Not having a clear and compelling call-to-action links at the end of a video puts you far away from a great lead gen opportunity. If the purpose of your video is to bring more customers by asking them to fill a form, request a demo etc., you can then measure the ROI by the number of conversions that came straight from the video views. You can do this by adding a link to the end of the video as a call to action, or plug in a link of any of your product features from the website. Then the link can be used to track conversions using Google Analytics.

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When a new feature is rolled out, test its acceptability by plugging a promo code towards the end of the video. After watching the video, the user tries to check the feature and takes benefit of the promotional offer. This also helps you measure that the video has given you the sale. To make the most out of CTAs, use actionable words such as start, learn, discover, join. Keep them under 10-15 so that users can easily grasp the message and click the link.

2. Measure Engagement Levels

Engagement levels are important metrics to gauge the effectiveness of video content. It gives an understanding whether the content is right for the video and flows in sync with the text on the website. If you embed a video in a blog post, then check the time taken by the visitor to reach the video starting from the top of the page. Some visitors can directly click the video without reading the text. You can generate a heatmap for this activity and check the levels of user engagement for your video.

3. Track Play Rate

Play Rate is a key metric that refers to the percentage of visitors that click the play button. If an informative email goes unclicked, it loses its sole purpose. On the same lines, if a message-oriented video goes unviewed, then the activity around that holds no value. This makes ‘Play Rate’ critical to measure the effectiveness of video content.

You can improve the play rate by proper thumbnail selection with perfect size and placement. Place thumbnails with humans as they are more appealing than the ones without. The ideal width of a video should be somewhere between 400 and 600 pixels. This also won’t make the page overcrowded.

4. Analyze Watch Rate

Next in line is Watch Rate, another key metric, that refers to the percentage of a video that’s watched by viewers. Most of the product videos initiate the buying process and that happens when the prospects enjoy a large portion of the video.

Making the customers click is one aspect and driving them to watch it till the end is another. Both the jobs are equally challenging. This makes watch rate more meaningful as it gives the right measure of the effectiveness of video content.

Many factors restrict the visitors from watching the video all through. This can be corrected by aligning the content of the video with the page context. If your video explains sales gamification and nestles on marketing automation page it may turn off your audience. If you want to reach out to a global market, add multi-language narration to the video or provide an option to turn on the subtitles with different variations.

Agile CRM uses Hotjar to measure the website traffic and effectiveness of videos. Hotjar offers video heatmaps that give an overview of the clicks on the video, the time spent on watching, skipping them ahead. The marketing team can carry these insights to rework their video marketing strategies.

The ultimate aim of marketing is to create content that makes customers more informed and happy. It also focuses on transforming your customers as brand loyal and starts campaigning for it. The videos have to attract new prospects and also engage the existing customers enabling them to share these videos on their social profiles. The number of ‘shares’ also gives you insights into how your customers are happy and tied to your product offerings.

Every marketer is under immense pressure to gain more ROI out of their marketing efforts, and it becomes more difficult when you include more channels in your marketing activities. As they say, what you see is what you get, you have to be on your toes to add the relevant metrics to measure effectiveness of video content and align your marketing strategy accordingly.