Proving video marketing ROI tracking is an essential part of succeeding with video. But many marketers struggle with tracking the ROI of their videos. Everyone seems to agree that video marketing is effective, but marketers still feel that proving ROI of video is a hurdle for them to spend even more money on online video ads. According to the IAB Video Ad Spend Study, 45% of the respondents stated that proving ROI of video marketing compared to other media is a hurdle for them to spend more money on digital video advertising.

What Is A View Worth Anyway?

So how does that fact that marketers find video marketing effective correlate to the fact that proving it is one of their biggest hurdles? Marketers know how to calculate the ROI of their E-books and white papers, they know how many leads and sales come from their AdWords, how well their Facebook ads are performing and how many conversions they get from their paid content delivery. So why not video? Well, video is a relative new and up and coming marketing tool and video analytics is a fragmented space. A “view” on YouTube and a “view” on Facebook isn’t the same thing, Facebook counts auto plays whereas YouTube counts full views. And how much is a “view” worth anyway? Probably somewhere close to how much a “like” is worth. It wasn’t long ago that marketers were chasing likes for their Facebook account before they stopped and said “hey, what is the ROI of this really?”. And if you are chasing “views” with your videos you won’t see a whole lot of ROI.

What To Track

Okay, so we’ve agreed that going past focusing on “views” is the way to go. Views can be good to measure reach and increased brand awareness, especially if you make a video that goes viral, but let’s focus on the more important metrics to find out the ROI of your videos. There are a LOT of possible video metrics that you can track, but these are the biggest and most important ones.

• Conversions from video traffic
  • Quite simple actually, how many conversions do you get from your videos? How many products did you sell as a direct cause from your videos? How many sign-ups to your email list came from that video campaign on Facebook or how many new users did you attain from the YouTube pre-roll ad campaign you ran?

• Conversion rates on pages with videos
  • Not exactly the same as conversions from video traffic, but close. Measuring conversion rates on landing pages and product pages compared to conversion rates on the same pages without videos can help you get a sense about how video impact the behaviour of your site visitors. If you perform A/B tests on the pages you want to put video on you can easily see how your video affect your bottom line. If you have specified how much a conversion is worth to you, then an increase in conversion rates equals to the ROI of that video.

• Engagement
  • Wait, wasn’t likes a useless vanity metric? Well, sort of. In itself, likes and shares and etc is a quite useless metric. It won’t tell you how your ROI is affected. But it can help you develop your video marketing strategy and figure out what resonates with your audience. Increasing engagement rates are a positive sign that you are moving in the right direction with your content. The idea is that better content = more engaging = more converting. But be sure not to abandon your target audience wants in search for likes and shares though.

• Audience retention
  • Audience retention is a super valuable metric to track, and it will help you perfect your video content to increase conversions and conversion rates. Figure out when people start to tune out and stop watching the video, to learn what works and what don’t work in your video content.

• Relevance
  • A metric only available on Facebook, the relevance score is a good way of measuring if you’re hitting the right target group, and how good your content is and if it is having an impact on your viewers. Also, the higher a video ad’s relevance score on Facebook is, the less the ad will cost to be delivered. This is because Facebook’s ad delivery system is designed to show the right content to the right people, and a high relevance score is seen by Facebook as a positive signal.

How To Track

So how can you track all of these metrics to figure out the ROI of your videos? The first thing you have to do is to be consistent with your URL tagging. When adding links back to your site in video descriptions, make sure to use the Google URL Builder. You can then track the campaign names in Google Analytics. Make sure you have set up proper goals and goal values in Google Analytics when doing this. Promoted YouTube videos will automatically be tracked in AdWords, so make sure to link Google Analytics and AdWords, and it will automatically add the AdWord campaign names in Google Analytics (learn how to set up a YouTube video ad campaign here). The other metrics are easily evaluated through the relevant platforms, both YouTube and Facebook have a multitude of video analytics that you can check out. For pure dollar value ROI, I would suggest either use Google Analytics or any other analytics platform such as Mixpanel or Kissmetrics. If you are using Facebook conversion pixels you can directly see in your Facebook ad report how much revenue is being driven directly from your video ads as well.

Conclusion

Tracking the ROI of your video marketing is important to justify your spending on video. It might seem complicated at first but it really isn’t that difficult. Sure, you can track dozen of different metrics and ways to calculate your video marketing ROI but I suggest starting with these. Do you want to step up your video marketing game? Give us your email and we’ll send you free video designs that you can use from www.shakr.com. It is simple to scale your video creation with Shakr. Get noticed. Amazingly simple video creation. Endless supply of great video designs.