I talk a lot about the value of video content on this blog, because I truly believe that it’s one of the most powerful marketing tools available to us. I have seen first hand how videos can positively affect a business, and I’m passionate about helping business owners use this powerhouse of marketing to their advantage. Even further, all indications point to video content becoming more valuable as the years tick by.
If you’ve already created videos for your business, I commend you. I am deeply aware that creating video content is no easy feat. Whether you are paying someone to do it or you are doing it yourself, it takes effort. But as with most things, we want to make sure our efforts are worth our while. One question I get asked often is- “How do I know if my current video content is effective?” and I completely understand why. As business owners, we are hardwired to examine our bottom line and we’re constantly searching for the best return on our investments.
RELATED: How To Choose A Great Videographer
The good news is, there are a variety of ways you can measure the performance of your current video content. But you’ll need to answer one important question first.
How To Measure The Success Of Your Video Content
What were your original goals?
Before you can even begin to determine whether or not your current videos are effective, you’ll need to go back to the beginning. Did you outline your goals? Did you have a clear plan on what you wanted the videos to do for you?
If not, then that is where you’ll need to start. If yes, then review those goals again. It’s important to have those in mind as you begin to measure the success of your video content.
RELATED: How To Successfully Use Video Content To Market Your Business
1 | Review the Analytics of the Page Your Video Lives On
If you embed your video into a page of your website, say on a landing page for example, then you should review the performance of that specific page. Google analytics makes it very easy for you to see this information, and you can filter by date. Ideally, you’ll want to compare how well your page did before and after you added the video. If you made the page live at the same time you added the video, you can still use this analytics data.
Not sure where to find that information? Here’s how you can check the performance of a specific page in google analytics:
Log into google analytics >>> Click on Behavior listed on the left hand side
Click on Site Content
Click on All Pages
You will then been shown a list of all the pages on your website. Find the page that you created with the video. If you’d like, you can then click directly on the page name which will filter out the rest.
There you can see the break down of that page’s performance. It will look like this:
What you want to pay attention to is the Avg. Time on Page and Bounce rate.
In an ideal world, you want the average time on the page to increase or remain at a reasonable level, (over 1 minute is a good rule of thumb). Conversely, you’ll want your bounce rate to be as low as possible. Bounce rate essentially measures the time a person landed on your page and when they closed out. You don’t want them to spend 10 seconds and leave right away, that means they didn’t engage with the content in a meaningful way.
2 | Views on your videos
The most obvious way to measure the success of your video content is to look at the overall views. Of course, the more views the better, but I’d also like to add that it’s equally important to check how much of the video people watch before clicking away.
If you choose to house your video on youtube (which I recommend) you will have access to analytics within your dashboard that will give you this information.
RELATED: Do You Need A Youtube Channel In 2019?
Not sure where that information is? Here’s how you can check the performance of your videos on Youtube’s dashboard:
Log into youtube >>> click on your icon in the top right
Click on Youtube Studio (beta)
On that page you can see your overall channel analytics (on the right) and/or click on and individual video to see a specific video is doing. What is important here is to check how many views you got overall, and how many minutes on average were watched. If both are increasing over time, then congratulations you have a healthy performing video!
3 | Click Through Rate
Here is where your outlined goals really come in to play. If your intention was to have people watch your video content and then click a specific page (like a blog post, or a landing page) or a link (like an affiliate link), then you’ll want to look at your click through rate.
There are many paid services to help you measure these clicks, but google analytics can give you a lot of information as well. Within your google analytics dashboard, you can see where most of your traffic comes from. If you notice that you’re getting traffic from youtube, then you’ll know that your videos are doing their job.
What’s more, there are many link building services that allow you to monitor how many people clicked on a specific link. One that I have used in the past is bit.ly. Bit.ly allows you to enter in one of your own links and it generates a short link for you that you can then share with others. Every time someone clicks on it, you can see that information in the bit.ly dashboard.
If you are looking to measure an affiliate link, you can log into your chosen affiliate account and see information about that there!
4 | Conversion rate
Similar to click through rate, you can measure the success of your video content by checking out your conversion rate. If your intention was to have people purchase a specific product, for example, you can take a look at your sales to see if there’s been an increase. Hopefully, you have a way in place to track your sales, and you can compare the dates prior to launching the video and after to see the difference.
5 | Comments
Comments are an excellent way to determine the effectiveness of your video content. First of all, do you have any comments at all? If you don’t, then that’s possibly an indication that viewers are not connecting with the content (or enough people having seen it). But if you do see comments, that’s a great sign! The more engaged the comments, the better!
6 | Sharing
How many times was the video shared? Youtube makes this easy to find out:
Log into youtube >>> click on your icon in the top right
Click on Youtube Studio (beta)
Click on Channel Analytics
Under top videos click see more >>> Under the filter section click more
Click Sharing Service
Here, you can see what videos were shared and how many times.
Bonus Round
I wanted to add one more point about measuring the success of your video content. One great practice to implement is to ask people where they found you. Say they sign up for your newsletter, or they actually purchase a product. Simply asking them somewhere along their buyer’s journey where they found you can give you incredible insight into how your content is performing.
How is your Video Content doing?
Hopefully these tips will help you determine just where your video content stands. If you find it’s doing better than you thought, that’s great! Now it’s time to capitalize on that momentum and create more! If you find that they aren’t doing as well as you’d like, you may be surprised that my solution the problem is still the same. It’s time to make more content with these new insights in mind.
How is your video content performing? Let me know in the comments below! Thank you for reading!
