Beyond Creation: Testing and Measuring the Success of Your Videos

Thanks to everyone that’s tuned into Brand Camp this week. In today’s live broadcast, Animoto’s Director of Acquisition Jake Malanoski touches on the elements of what makes a video successful. How do you decide what your objectives are? How do you measure results to determine if those videos were a success? How do you test to figure out what types of videos will bring you the most success? And what do you do if you fail?

We know that these topics can be a bit overwhelming—especially when you’re just starting out. To help you get started, we’ve put together a list of helpful resources.

Setting your goals for social video

First things first, you’ll need to decide what your objectives are. Your objective is really the why behind your video. What are you trying to achieve? Some examples include brand awareness, social engagement, driving more visits to your website, or getting people to purchase. We dig in deep on this in a blog post from earlier this year on What Are Your Goals for Social Video in 2018?

Measuring the success of organic videos

If you are posting your video to your Facebook page and aren’t spending money to get your video in front of more people, you’ll be able to view your results using Facebook Insights—Facebook’s built-in analytics tools. Checkout this great beginners guide to Facebook analytics from Hootsuite to learn more.

Using Instagram? Make sure you’ve got a Business profile and then head over to check out Hubspot’s guide on how to use Instagram Insights.

Measuring the success of video ads

Once you’ve run an ad, based on the objective you chose for your video, it’s time to measure the results. Before running your ad, make sure you’ve set clear goals for what you’re hoping to achieve. Then, once your ad is done running (or even during your campaign), you can take a look at your ad performance and results in Facebook Ads Manager. Facebook offers a great tutorial on measuring results in Ads Manager.

Testing video ads

Last but not least—testing! Testing your ads is a great way to figure out what works best for your audience (and even what audience your content resonates best with). We’ve put together a full guide to A/B testing videos, including what is A/B testing, what variations to test, how to easily create video variations with Animoto, setting up a test in Facebook, and measuring results.

Our Brand Camp Talk

On our final day of Brand Camp, our Director of Acquisition, Jake Malanoski, gave his presentation on setting goals and measuring results within Facebook Ads Manager. Click here to see the entire talk and read our highlights from the session.

Have questions? Join the Animoto Social Video Marketing Community on Facebook for inspiration, ideas, and input on your video marketing endeavors.