Video plays a key role in today’s digital marketing strategies when engaging with consumers. Video can drive clicks and conversions and turn first-time consumers into loyal customers. A robust video strategy ensures understanding of the audience and how they are using video content. To add measurability to video strategy publishers need to understand the rich metrics video provides.

Analytics and reporting can help determine which videos are successful, which aren’t, what types of videos works with different audience segments, and which videos need a little extra work. By measuring the analytics associated with video you can understand the trends and begin to optimize video content.

Benefits:

Drive conversion through information and education on product and service offerings

• Build brand awareness and drive engagement
• Provide support and training resources for post-sales self service
• Leverage consumer loyalty through user-generated content that promotes brand and products

Moving into the “Limelight” and Making an Impact (Some Stats)

- 30-second mobile video ads have an 88.3% completion rate-2011 with an increase to 89% in 2012. (Rhythm Insights)

- Mobile users have a longer attention span/patience when it comes to watching videos. Compared to desktop users that spend two minutes on average watching videos, iPhone users spend 2.4 minutes on average; Android users, 3 minutes; Symbian users, 4 minutes; and iPad users, 5 minutes. (MeFeedia)

- 90% of online shoppers find videos useful when deciding to make a purchase. (Internet Retailer)

- 2013 will evolve combinations of big data and video delivering customer experiences that are personalized, real-time and offer increased levels of interactivity (SocialTimes)

- 4 out of 5 users will click away when a video stalls while loading (NYTimes)

- Users remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see and 50% of what they see and hear (Thomas Metcalf)

- If your video ads prove enjoyable to a viewer, your chances of getting a sale increase by 97%, brand preference by 35%, and brand association, 139%. (Unruly)

- Personal relevance is the key to increasing video engagement: Viewers spend 2.5X more time watching personally relevant short-form videos (SocialTomes)

- An average user spends 16 minutes and 49 seconds to watch video ads in a month. (comScore)

Steps to Defining An “Award Winning” Strategy:

1. Define the business objectives: Determining how to engage the audience as well as at what level across the customer lifecycle. Understand the basic definitions and KPIs associated with measuring video online. (I.e., presenting the metrics in a business context), and defining which of those KPIs will best benefit the business.

- Drive Conversions

- Brand Engagement

- Post Sales Service-training and support

- Promote loyalty and promote brand

2. Implementing a technology solution that delivers on that strategy, and that supports both client-side and server-side collection for video-based content.

3. Understand the audience: You need to understand who the audience is to deliver the correct video content that inspires action. Following industry best practices begin by segmenting the audience into three broad categories: casual browsers, interested consumers, and existing buyers. (Brightcove)

- Casual browsers-this is the largest segment and the least informed about your brand. They may have never heard of your brand, have limited knowledge, or are just becoming interested. For this segment, aim to create awareness, gain their attention, and convince them that your brand is worthy of consideration.

- Interested consumers-these are people who are aware of your brand and are beginning the consideration process. You want to engage and inform these consumers, focusing on competitive differentiation.

- Existing customers-this audience is deep in the consideration process. They are not concerned about your brand versus another brand; instead, they are making a specific decision on a particular product or service. They want detailed information. One of the best ways to do this is to embed a call-to-action link in a video.

4. Determine the right content: Building content that resonates and drives action with each segment.

5. Measuring: Analytics and reporting can answer essential questions to optimize content and maximize the value of video initiatives. Video analytics can provide overview performance information and granular visibility into performance of video content and how online video impacts other key performance indicators across the website or marketing campaign.

- Measuring Engagement: Video engagement reports allow for identification of the strongest and weakest video assets. Videos that produce the highest engagement among viewers should be candidates for further promotion. While completion rates and viewing time are key ingredients for engaging video content, another key metric of interest is volume of unique views that their video content generates. This metric is defined by the number of videos an average viewer is watching.

- Defining “Engagement” and Conversion: Video Engagement vs. Site/Other Engagement. Understanding the purpose of the video and determining what to track: visitor click through to the web site, whether visitors watch additional videos, and/or whether these visitors exhibit different behaviors than the non-video watching population interacting with the site

- Optimal Lengths & Attention Span Metrics: Understanding the optimal length of videos can help inform video production and editing decisions that maximize the impact of video content. Average viewing time, drop off, and abandonment are important metrics to understand viewer attention spans and dictate online video programming decisions.

- Discoverability: Among the most valuable qualities of online video is its unique ability to aid in the discoverability of a website and to drive traffic. Whether it’s through search engines or third-party referrals, video is a powerful way to attract new visitors to web properties and increase audience reach. Videos can actually improve the chances of webpages to appear on the first page of search results in Google compared to site content that only feature pictures and graphics. Also, video thumbnails in search results stand out and draw more clicks than standard text-based descriptions and links. Reviewing search term reports and number of views were referred from search engines help identify search success.

- Social Sharing and Distribution: Understanding socialization of videos can be monitored to analyze social channel performance and popular distribution channels. Another great benefit of online video is the ability to distribute across multiple websites and domains for maximum exposure. To identify which outlets are performing, utilize analytics to monitor traffic, engagement, geographic statistics, and more to identify where content performs best.

6. Mobile-Ready: Consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices for everything. According to the Adobe 2012 Mobile Consumer Survey, video increases the likelihood of purchase from a mobile device. Brands are broadening their use of video to link online video via mobile phones to the business environment or as a means to educate consumers.

7. Test, Target, and Optimize: To make sure the video experience is targeted and relevant to each segment, a video optimization strategy should be planned for. For example, you can test the effectiveness of an interactive video, with or without detail callouts embedded in the video. Or test different video lengths to validate the ideal time for holding consumers’ attention or the effectiveness of a particular promotion within a video. You can quickly and easily understand which variation of a viewing experience resonates best with your customers as a whole, as well as within different segments. By tying analytics to optimization, you can target and personalize videos to deliver richer experiences to each consumer and channel, leading to increased conversions and improved ROI.

Tools You Should be Using:

• Bits on the run, JW Player
• Longtail Video Analytics
• Wista: Heatmap, analytics, and user identification and tagging
• Brightcove: Most popular with enterprise and integration with Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, Quantcast, Nielsen and Comscore

“The Stars”-Video KPIs:

Awareness

- Visits and UV

- Repeat visitors

- Total % of visitors viewing video

Video Engagement

- Reporting by ALL videos and Individual Videos

- Views

- PVs: Loads a page that a video is contained in (good to compare PVs to views and understand user playback)

- Ratio of video views to page views

- Top Video title and URL

- Average duration: total, categories, or individual videos

- Video Plays: the number of times playback of a video was started. Only the initial start is counted, resuming of a paused video is not – - – Number of times a video is embedded-the player is showing but the video has not started

- Time viewed: total time spent watching video

- Video completes by each video- the number of times playback of a video was completed.

- What videos are popular, types that are popular and how it correlates with site changes (alignment with analytics)

- Video heatmaps: visually shows parts of the video watched, stopped watching and where skipped ahead

- Video engagement- scene by scene view of engagement of video-tells where users dropped off and spikes tell where users replayed sections

User Demographics:

- Visitor demographics for each video

- Identity tagging-to follow individual users-to see what they have watched now, past, future

- Bandwidth consumption

- OS

- Systems/Channels

Socializing:

- Video sharing

- Video embedding on another site

Conversion and Marketing:

- CTR-to site action

- Conversion rate-end action user should take-success event

- per view

- Email marketing campaigns w/video-(specific to certain email clients)

- Correlation between channels-and channel attribution

- Search and referral sources and terms

- Testing placement on site and optimize player options based on feedback-survey