Tracking of Online Video Campaigns

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The promotion of a product/service using Videos   is an important part of Social Media Marketing. In this article we discuss some main points related to tracking of such campaigns. This article is not focused on any particular tool instead it tries to enumerate the basic idea behind tracking of such campaigns.

Background

The Video can be embedded on a web page or can be uploaded to a video sharing site such as YouTube.  YouTube provides a free tool called “YouTube Insight” which provides lot of useful statistics for uploaded videos. You can answer questions like

• In which geographical region is the video being viewed the most?
• What day of the week does the video get maximum visits?
• Which are the hotspots in the video? (Hot Spots can be broadly defined as critical points in your video where the interest level of people peaks or drops)

For videos embedded on a web page we can use Event Tracking feature of Google Analytics to keep track of events like play, stop, pause and lot more. It also helps in answering questions like:

• How many people saw the video (Unique Vs All Views)
• How long did the people watch it?

In case a YouTube video is embedded on a web page, then chrome less YouTube player can be used which is a modified version of the normal YouTube player.  Basically one can put the tracking code inside the Player controls which is not possible in case of normal YouTube player.

The following are some of the insights one can get from tracking these campaigns:

Where are the viewers coming from?

Location information of the visitor can be provided in GA or most other Web Analytics tools. Based on this and other demographic information one can know if the video is reaching the target audience or not.

How are the viewers finding the video?

This can be measured using various parameters like duration of video seen by users, percentage of

people on that page seeing the video etc. Bounce rate of the page might not be a useful metric in this case as people might see a very good video and then leave the site without visiting other pages.

How are they distributing it?

One way to keep track of this is from the source of visitors coming to the video page after the video has been there for some time. For these referral visitors we can find the sites where they have come from. An increase in direct visits of new visitors may indicate offline promotion of the video through various means (It might also be because of the link of the video being non clickable on other sites).

What did they say about the campaign (positive/negative?)

A way to do this would be an automated agent which goes through the comments made on all the sites where the video is being talked about.  This agent judges the nature of the comment by parsing thorough it. This would be helpful in terms of tracking effectiveness of a Social Media Campaign. It could do almost real time monitoring and raise an alarm if say for example lots of negative comments are being generated.

Has the video helped in increasing the Brand Recall?

Organic visits based on brand related keywords can give an indication about this. If possible the

Key phrase being highlighted in the video should be somewhat different from phrases being promoted in other campaigns (In case you are running offline campaigns as well).  People who come to the site by typing this term (or similar terms) in a Search Engine can be clearly attributed to the Video campaign.

An increase in direct traffic can also be a result of the video in case there are no other campaigns promoting the product.

Has the brand engagement increased?

This can be measured by content engagement metrics like amount of time people spend on the site, the no of pages they visit etc.  One can segment the visitors coming to the site into

1) Coming from video campaigns

2) Coming from other campaigns

For these two segments a comparative study of the above mentioned metrics can be indicative of the effectiveness of video campaigns.

Are the viewers moving more towards the ‘Action’ page and have customer drop outs increased?

This can be measured by looking at the funnel before and after the launch of the video (assuming the funnel was present before the video was launched).  A funnel is a series of steps the visitor takes on your site to complete a goal e.g.  To register to your site can be a goal, buying a product can be a goal.

Here also we can segment the visitors into

1) Coming from video campaigns

2) Coming from other campaigns

And then analyze the funnel for both the segments to see the effectiveness of video campaigns.

Have leads/sales increased?

The increase in online leads can be attributed to a video campaign using any web analytics tool. In case the campaign also gives a phone no then leads can come on phone/sms as well.  If video campaign is the only one running then it can be easily attributed for the phone/sms based leads as well. In case of multiple campaigns there should be basic CRM related software which stores the source of the lead along with other data.

The above points try to give an overview of Online Video tracking using Web analytics tools and other techniques.  We can certainly hope to see new ingenious tracking techniques as this field continues to grow.

Contributed by Ravi Shukla

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Tags: campaign tracking, funnel, online video campaign, PPC, video tracking