Your spending on corporate web commercials represents a significant portion of your company’s marketing budget, so it’s important to define what success means to you from the very beginning in order to set your web commercial goals.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as saying that “X” number of hits on your video will make the video a success. Furthermore, it is often difficult to link a view on a web commercial view to actual sales. This is even more true when you have both online and offline sales operations. To make setting your web commercial goals simpler, we’ve outlined 5 important web video metrics below and explained when they may be applicable to your marketing function. With this information, you can decide what amount of impact you would like to see as a result of your web commercial goals, so you can be sure to leverage your video fully.
Conversions
Conversions are often the easiest way to measure the impact that your web video has had on sales revenue. These can be tracked by providing a specific link to be associated with your web video and use it to identify when a user who clicked on that link was led to purchase an item, or “convert”. Services such as Google AdWords is very well suited for this. This goal definition works best for companies that operate primarily through e-commerce. However, there is no way to attribute a conversion caused by the web video when the user does not click on the link associated with that video. As such, search engines tend to render this method somewhat ineffective.
Views
The number of views, or impressions, on a video is a powerful measurement of how many pairs of eyes is your commercial being exposed to. It is also easily measured, unlike conversions, as all of the major video hosting sites track the number of views on all of your videos. (But always remember to use only one host!) Views are often important to start-up companies that are trying to generate general brand awareness, or companies with a new product offering. It is often hard to determine what the return on investment is when views are the main goal of your commercial, since general brand awareness can be relatively difficult to put a dollar value on. As such, views should only be the primary goal of your video if the main web commercial goal is to generate awareness of your product or brand.
Social Media Interaction
An often overlooked metric, social media interaction is easily measured and is a great way to get an idea of who is interested in your product or service. With 1.6 billion users on Facebook and 320 million on Twitter, social media involves a considerable portion of the world’s population. As such, it pays to not trivialize the impact of social media on your marketing function. If a viewer likes, shares, or comments on your web commercial on any social network, it can provide you with insight to answer such questions as: “Is this commercial reaching its target market?” and “What do people think about the product or service that the commercial is about?” In this way, the measurement of likes, shares, re-tweets, etc. represents a treasure trove of information. With social interaction as your key metric, you can generate insights into how viewers respond to and engage with your content.
Revenue Growth
Perhaps the best way to measure your return on investment with a web commercial is the measurement of growth in revenue while your video is live. Of course, revenue does not exist in a closed system, so there is no way to definitively ascribe your revenue or sales growth to one particular factor. However, with a little bit of math, you can control away certain factors to help determine how effective your web commercial is at generating growth in revenues. Fortunately, this goal is applicable across all for-profit companies, and leads to a very close look at what the return on your investment in your web commercial actually looks like!
Web Traffic
Traditional TV or radio commercials were originally meant to drive traffic to brick and mortar stores. On the other hand, web commercials are typically written specifically drive the target market to a specific website or webpage. Web traffic is automatically measured by website hosts such as Squarespace and can be easily measured with the use of tools such as Google Analytics. If you see a marked increase in your web traffic after releasing your new web commercial, (and you haven’t recently released another marketing campaign) this can be a key sign that your web commercial is generating awareness of your product or brand, and is also driving interest in viewers. What makes this metric sometimes more appealing than web conversions is that web traffic is much more easily and directly measured. It sidesteps many of the pitfalls discussed above by measuring all traffic to a given page or site. Web traffic makes an excellent primary or secondary goal for virtually any company that has an online presence. As such, even if you don’t set this as a goal, it can be important to track web traffic nonetheless.
What types of web commercial goals are you setting? Leave us a comment below!
