3 Metrics for Measuring YouTube Marketing Effectiveness

Many businesses and organizations are investing in video as part of their digital marketing strategy, especially recently with the advent of new video technologies that allow for live streaming, virtual reality, and other interactive mediums. For a brand or product to come to life through video can be a compelling and powerful tool to drive sales, messaging and awareness. But how exactly can you measure how effective your video marketing efforts are? Here are three criteria to help you set the bar for success.

Metric #1: Setting the Business Goal

This is often the most overlooked metric by most businesses and marketers for the simple reason that they do not know what defines the success of a video marketing campaign. If it’s the goal to “go viral,” then how exactly is this defined? And how is it a success? What’s imperative is to set a goal that is quantifiable, because without it it’s impossible to measure success.

Usually, that goal is financial success. For your YouTube marketing campaign to be successful, it needs to be targeted in a way that will increase business, brand awareness, but the form it takes will be very specific and unique to the business making the investment in video marketing. Establishing what the goal(s) are, in addition to who the target audience is, and what their behaviors are like, should be the first step you make towards creating metrics for measuring YouTube marketing success.

Metric #2: View Duration

Measuring the view duration of your video will automatically give you a really good indication whether or not your video is engaging or interesting enough to your target audience. On YouTube, the “relative audience retention” graph measures how long your audience stays on your channel as opposed to others across the network. If your video is 30 seconds long and users are dropping off after the first five to ten seconds, chances are that you’ve not targeted the right audience, or need to shift your messaging to appeal to them in a different way.

In the same vein, audience retention is a great indicator of whether or not your brand messaging is having any effect whatsoever. If users are simply arriving at your video and leaving your channel, while you may have measurable views, it might not necessarily translate into a measurable goal achieved for the campaign. Views alone should never be considered a KPI.

Metric #3 Search Trends

Generally speaking, most businesses invest in video marketing to increase their brand awareness and amplify their services to a wider audience who may be searching for it. Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to search for terms related to your campaign, and to see if there’s been any effect since you’ve implemented your campaign. This takes notes of any shares, mentions, comments, or links to your video, in other words, is a global litmus test for how much people are engaging with your content.

YouTube is a vast platform for marketers, offering up so much potential to businesses to take full advantage of, because is encompasses a very unique space. YouTube is a search engine, a hosting platform for video producers, an advertising medium, and a place to access content. As complex as all of these things make it, for the user is still a very simple thing: a place to watch interesting videos.

CC Image courtesy of Joe the Goat Farmer on Flickr