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Video Metrics and ROI. The basics. Measure the ROI.

Across the web, you will find studies and statistics that show the importance of video in digital marketing today. Across industries, marketers are using the format to educate their audience, highlight their products and services, and include social proof in their messaging.

But all of that is general. How can you make sure that the revenue generated through your own videos actually justifies its costs? In other words, how can you determine the return on investment for the videos you create? How can you measure the ROI on video? Follow these 5 steps to achieve measurement success.

1) Set Your Goal

First things first: you don’t know how successful your video will be if you don’t know what actually constitutes success. As a result, any video has to be set up with a particular goal in mind. The exact nature of that goal, of course, can vary widely:

• Lead Conversions on a Landing Page
• Engagement on Social Media
• Shopping Cart Adds on Product Pages
• and much more.

Each of these require a slightly different measurement strategy. But ultimately, they all follow the same principle: find a core metric, and use it as your benchmark for success. Having a manager measure the ROI for you? Be aware of the goal and expectation. And ask for clarification.

2) Determine Your Metrics

The general goal of your video helps not just in focusing its creation, but also in determining the metric you will use to track its success. Here, it’s best to focus on a single, primary metric that is directly related to the goal itself.

For instance, you can track a video’s impact on lead conversions by the conversion rate of the landing page on which it lands. Engagement on social media is measured through the likes, comments, and link clicks on the video post. Explainer videos are best tracked through total views, and views that cover at least 50 percent of the video.

3) Set up a Control Group

Now that you know what metric to track, it’s time to make sure you will know the difference a video actually makes as it relates to that metric. A simple way to measure the ROI and accomplish that feat is to set up two identical scenarios, one with the video and one without.

Depending on your channel, you can run the test simultaneously. A landing page, for example, can be easily duplicated to include a video on one version but no video on the other. Other channels, like social media, might require subsequent testing periods.

4) Build a Time Frame

Speaking of which: your next step should be to set up the exact time period through which you measure the success of your video. Don’t limit yourself in terms of the total lifetime of the medium; instead, set a relatively limited time period (such as one week) that still gives you enough data to avoid sample error.

5) Evaluate Results

After the time you have given yourself, it’s time for the big reveal: understanding exactly what results your video actually brought about. Based on your core metric and overall goal for the video, it should be easily to evaluate what return on your investment has actually brought.

If the results are inconclusive, extend the time frame. You can also take the metric further; if an explainer video on a product page resulted in a 20% increase in shopping cart adds, and you know that 60 percent of your customers usually check out their shopping cart, you can easily estimate how much your video actually provided in terms of additional revenue.

Determining the ROI of your video can seem difficult, because the metrics are not typically directly related to your conversion goals. But through the above steps, you can approximate the results, and improve your video marketing strategy over time. To learn more about creating videos with a positive ROI, contact us.