5 Tips for Testing the Effectiveness of Marketing Videos
Video is a great addition to your marketing arsenal, but when you make a video, don’t just throw it to the wolves! It’s important to test and track metrics around your video so you can constantly be improving and reiterating to get the most out of your video marketing efforts. We’ve put together some tips and ideas for testing the effectiveness of your marketing videos.
But first… let’s set some goals!
Before you can decide whether your video had the desired effect, you’ll need to decide what effect you want it to have. Figure out what your goals are and then track the metrics that’ll help you determine whether you reached these goals. Need some help? Check out our blog post on determining your objectives for video marketing.
And now — on to the tips!
Tip 1: Use a test audience
Each time you finish a video, before you upload anywhere, share it with a test audience. The test audience can be a friend, family member, colleague, or anyone really. The only requirement is that the person — or people — you show it to should not have any background information on your video content or goals. They should watch it with a fresh eye and then give you feedback. What did they think the point of the video was? Did it have the intended effect? If not, iterate until it does!
Tip 2: A/B test your content
When creating videos for marketing — especially videos you’ll be paying to advertise — you can learn a lot through A/B testing. Make a couple different versions of your video and try different techniques. Then, see which video performs the best. Apply these learnings to make future videos more effective.
This year for Mother’s Day, we ran a TrueView ad campaign on YouTube. Our video marketing coordinator Mitch Brooks worked with our consumer customer owner Beth Forester to create two different videos. We’ll take the learnings gleaned from the video that performed better (the first!) with us as we work on future campaigns in order to make them more effective.
Tip 3: A/B test your promotion
Don’t just try different things with your video content — try different things with your promotion too to see which are the most effective for your specific goals.
Our social media manager Emily frequently posts content in different ways to learn more about what types of posts perform best. In the example below, she’s shared the same content, once with a video and once with an image linking out to a blog post with the same video. As you run these sorts of tests you’ll learn what posting style resonates best with your audience.
Tip 4: Create and use UTM codes
It can sometimes be difficult to attribute video views to conversions. That’s why you should include links along with calls to action in your video descriptions or in the text that you use when sharing videos on social platforms. UTM codes are bits of text added to your URLs or links that will tell Google Analytics where traffic was directed from. This way, you’ll be able to track the number of people that came from the link tied to that video.
Buffer’s Complete Guide to UTM Codes is a great resource for those getting started with this practice.
Tip 5: Take advantage of free analytics tools
Finally, most of the platforms where you’re likely to share your videos offer free tools to help you measure everything from the number of views to watch time, engagement, and more. Don’t just throw a video out there and forget about it — dive in to see what worked, what didn’t, and take some time to think about what you can improve for next time.
- Facebook offers Insights on Pages. You can learn how to get started with Facebook Insights in Facebook’s Help Center.
- YouTube’s also got an amazing Analytics suite that can tell you a lot about video performance. Learn about the basics in YouTube’s Help Center.
- Twitter also offers free analytics and they recently started sharing stats around video activity. Find out more about the Tweet activity dashboard in Twitter’s Help Center.
- Google Analytics is an amazing resource for tracking the success of video campaigns (particularly when you use UTM codes, as we mentioned above). Check out The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics by Moz.
What do you do to test the effectiveness of your marketing videos? Share your tips with us in the comments below.