We’ve all heard conversations about the video revolution and its rise to being as a potent content format is undeniable. Resistance is futile! It’s time to surf the video trend towards more effective and efficient marketing!

Alas, despite everything you’ve heard, it’s still natural to have reservations. Video marketing can demand costly investment when compared to other traditional forms of marketing. Video marketing trends suggest that this year businesses can have crazy growth by using video as a medium.

And it is not something that’s available for big businesses, even small startups can use Video as a medium and get more traction for their business this year.

So regardless if you’ll be promoting your video content in a funky medium such as video books or simply sharing it on YouTube and Social Media, you may have questions such as:

“Well, if I accept the fact that video marketing is the future then how can I measure its ROI?”

This is the question on the lips of many marketers and business owners, when making the transition to using video marketing you’ll need to ensure that video content’s ROI outperforms your existing tactics.

You need comparative data. When initially trialing video marketing remember to compile as much data from your chosen platforms.

We see that brands and individuals are open to video but before they stake their marketing budgets and investments, they want to know exactly how they can get the most bang for their buck.

We understand this, and it was only late last year that we were struggling to find metrics for video marketing ROI. It’s a different story now.

When it comes to investment and ROI, everything revolves around the stats. Without metrics, it’s all just guesswork.

This is why we’ve crafted an estimated ROI formula for many financial and analytical purposes.

Before we delve right into it, let’s overview the tools that’ll help us assess and analyze your video campaigns:

Google Analytics for website Analysis:

Created by Google, this tool allows you to measure and analyze your website’s traffic. By monitoring incoming data, you’ll easily be able to see an overview of your website’s performance. Google Analytics really is a one-stop shop for all things related to website analytics. Whilst it doesn’t provide data points on specific users, it’s incredibly powerful for either analyzing all of your video marketing campaigns or drilling right down into individual campaigns.

Video Analytics for Analysing Videos Specifically:

When running video campaigns, it’s critical to use tools that can measure the actual performance of your video. This means that you’ll need to monitor views, engagement, shares, comments and other activities.

External analytical tools such as Vidooly and Wistia are superior to internal site analytics on Vimeo and YouTube, but in the vast majority of cases, internal video analytical tools will suffice.

Internal Video Analytics Tools:

Other tools include Optimizely, Infusionsoft, Vidyard, and Optify. These provide an abundance of advanced data points across many aspects of video marketing and performance.

Also Read – 30 Content Marketing ROI Statistics to Prove that Content Marketing is Indispensable

Video Success: The Key Metrics:

a) Unique Views:

Unique views simply refer to the quantity of unique individuals that have viewed your video. This provides you with valuable clues about the reach of your video. More views = increased likelihood that someone will click on the video. For example, a video with 1 million views is always more attractive than one on the same subject with just 100,000 views.

In addition, unique views help your video climb the rankings on sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

b) Total Views and Unique Views:

Total views take an aggregate figure for repeat viewers and unique viewers. Total views may seem like a fairly useless statistic compared to unique views but repeat engagement is a very positive signal.

Unique views drive a video forward but total views provide clues that your video has sticking power to those unique viewers. We want people to be watching our video over and over again!

c) CTR:

Click through rate (CTR) indicates the number of people that have clicked through to complete an action after viewing your video. Well produced and cleverly scripted videos can provide you with enhanced CTR’s that’ll exceed traditional content types.

CTRs vary and with a huge number of human factors such as video quality, format and engagement, persuasion and the use of language, music, etc. The anatomy of a video is complex and getting everything right and in balance is challenging yet achievable.

d) Engagement / Average Viewer Attention Span:

Engagement refers to the time that your viewers actually spend watching the video. If your video holds people’s attention for the majority of the video’s duration then well done! If, however, viewers tend to click off the video after just a few seconds, your analytics may be signaling to you that your introduction needs to be more enticing. Try focusing on hooking in the viewer early with a promise or with use great presentation skills to further their engagement with your video content.

It goes without saying that enhanced engagement is always a good sign.

Be mindful that where your call to action (CTA) is placed can influence where and how many of your users decide to stop engaging with the video content.

For example, if you place your CTA early within the video and your engagement drops off around that point, then you’ll likely know that a large amount of your audience may simply be following your CTA rather than solely losing interest in your video.

Social Media Metrics Of Measuring Video Success:

a) Shares, Comments, Tweets, & Likes:

Video plays a huge role on social media, analyzing your video content in the context of a social environment requires a unique perspective in comparison to YouTube and other classical video streaming platforms.

Social media’s video metrics are similar to the traditional platform but also include exclusive metrics such as tweets, retweets, pins etc. Analysing these metrics can produce a full picture of how people are reacting to your video.

Out of all of the metrics, shares are often the most potent. Shares can exponentially increase the reach of your video, especially if those sharing it have lots of followers. Shares are also the key to assessing if your video has gone or could go viral.

Comparing social media statistics can also show you how well your video performs across different social platforms.

b) Brand Searches:

Analysing brand searches across various social platforms can indicate whether more people are searching up your brand or product in response to a video campaign. Increases in brand searches during the period of a campaign insinuates that your video has indeed been successful. This allows you to assess the impact your video has had on your chosen social platform. More brand searches = greater success!

Assessing the Factors Involved in Lead Metrics

Lead Conversion Rate:

This valuable metric provides you with the percentage of your viewers that actively convert into leads. In order to analyze this, you’ll need a landing page with web analytics, it’s recommended to make a unique landing page that’s aligned to your initial video advert’s message.

If you’re budget-strapped, you can also adapt/tweak existing pages to match your incoming traffic from your video.

Remember to take advantage of A/B split testing and boost your conversion rates by rapidly experimenting with images, ad copy and changing the layout of your landing pages. Two tools that you can use for this are:

Google Optimise
Optimizely

Revenue Metrics: A More General Perspective on Video ROI:

a) The Effectiveness of Total Revenue as a Marketing Metric:

Analysing your campaigns revenue is the first point of reference for determining the success of your video campaign. However solely focusing on revenue can be misleading, it’s worthwhile analyzing all of the following metrics in tandem:

Ad Spend
Conversions
Cost per Conversion
Revenue
Return on Investment (ROI)

Ultimately return on investment is the golden metric that you should continually strive to improve. Secondary metrics are cost per conversion, revenue, conversions and finally, ad spend.

b) In-campaign Revenue:

Campaign revenue refers specifically to the impact that a video campaign has one the single product or service that you may have promoted. You can analyze how sales of one promoted product are climbing and assess correlations with increased video reach.

Estimated ROI Calculations:

For Start-ups and Beginner Businesses:

Smaller businesses may be running small campaigns or localized video campaigns. These might have a smaller, limited reach, however, even the smallest businesses can go viral with a carefully organized video campaign!

For small businesses, it’s best to focus your analysis on:

A tightly grouped array of basic metrics: These include: CTR (%), cost per conversion, shares, conversion rate (%).
Correlate your data: A simple approach is to attribute all of your leads by marketing campaign source, trial your video marketing campaigns and then view which video marketing channel provides you with the best return on investment.
Social media traffic and engagement: This is another great way to assess the gravity of your video marketing campaign. Investigate the following metrics and how much your video advertisements have influenced them: Followers/Page Like Growth (%), No. of Monthly Shares, Social Share Growth (%).

For SMEs and Intermediate Level Businesses:

Intermediate brands or businesses such as Photography Talk have the luxury of additional resources, are able to run multiple campaigns simultaneously and gather insightful data at a faster speed. Although this adds complexity and additional time to analyze the campaigns it does provide such organizations with a means to quickly experiment and discover profitable ROI driven video marketing campaigns.

Define your goals in clear and simple terms. This will help point you towards a valid array of metrics. For example, brand awareness points you towards brand searches and social media signals whereas sales point you towards revenue.
Set benchmarks for your goals and focus on where you are prior to running your campaign. If you understand where your brand is right now and any associated metrics then you’ll be in a better position to analyze upcoming changes.
If you’re using advanced data collection tools then set them up correctly and make sure that they’re capturing relevant data.
Once you’ve set your goals and gathered your relevant tools then it’s time to start measuring. Look for correlations between the key metrics that are directly linked to your campaign’s goals.

Enterprise or Advanced Level Businesses:

Advanced or enterprise sized businesses will have clear marketing budgets and these will often be high. Gathering data on specific video performance and outcomes may be tricky as this data may conflict with other business operations.

You may have to factor in costs from many levels of the marketing chain. A video campaign may be running directly in parallel to another campaign and this makes specific analysis more difficult. All budgets will have to be reviewed in detail and measured often. This includes everything from operational costs to executive costs and any other direct or indirect cost that relates to your campaign.
Any advanced business should have data available on past campaigns. Many of these might have been for the same purpose as your video campaign (e.g. brand awareness). Gather data on these and discover what you learned in the past and where you can improve. You can combine this with stats on customer acquisition and its associated costs, the long-term value of a lead and similar metrics.
For enterprise level businesses, it’s key to see how competitor behavior tallies against your own plans. Study how competitors are using video right now.

In bigger or more advanced businesses, you may often be reporting to directors or those who are approving marketing budgets. You must make sure that you provide a clear and coherent context to your campaign.

Measuring ROI: A Math-based Approach

Here, we have crafted a useful formula for determining an ROI figure for video marketing programs.

Product Marketing video [E-commerce]:

(Product sales x 0.44) x 0.05 = Video Marketing Budget

ROI = (Product Sales x 0.44)/ Video Marketing Budget

Notes:

The figure 0.44 is selected from evidence retrieved from a recent study. This study indicated that e-commerce companies who use video in their campaigns experience an average increase of 144% in sales. Multiplying by .05 produces the gross product margin.

Corporate Video Training:

(hourly trainer rate x staff hours reduction x 5) x .1 = Video marketing budget

ROI = (hourly trainer rate x staff hours reduction x 5)/ Video Budget

This calculation shows the potential quantity of training staff that are not strictly essential to your video campaign. This can be measured over 5 year periods. You can then multiply by 10% to produce an investable video budget.

Business To Business Marketing Video:

Total landing page traffic x (Current conversion rate x 1.88) x Close rate x Average ticket Size) x .05 = Video Marketing budget

ROI = Total landing page traffic x (current conversion rate x 1.88) x Close rate x Average Ticket Size) / Video marketing budget.

Evidence suggests that landing page videos increase conversion rates by up to 80%. That means we can measure our total landing page traffic to multiply it by conversion rates.

This can then be multiplied by the close rate (usually provided by the sales team) and the average cost of the product. This allows you to generate a budget and ROI for your campaign.

HR Recruitment Marketing Video: IS THIS NEEDED?

Annual recruiting budget x .15 = Video marketing budget

It would be great if you could invest 15% of your annual marketing budget in video marketing efforts. This way, you’ll attract inbound interest from a lot of recruits and the overall quality of your candidates will be really high.

Brand Video Marketing:

Annual marketing budget x .10 = Brand Video marketing budget

It’s best to dedicate 10% of your annual marketing budget into the video.

Conclusion

Video marketing ROI is measurable via a selection of metrics that surround everything from sales to social media. If you thought that measuring video ROI was different to measuring traditional marketing ROI then think again. It’s just as easy – you just need to be aware of the specific metrics that are associated to video. Use these generalized estimated calculations to help you along your way to video marketing success!