How to understand the value of Video Advertising and measure performance

The reason I love digital marketing is that you can measure almost everything and know exactly what’s working and what’s not. Simply put, if you see conversions coming through, you know you’re doing it right. When it comes to video campaigns, however, I often found myself fumbling around metrics unsure how to measure performance.

YouTube has now over a billion users – meaning almost one-third of the internet, according to the latest stats. With this in mind, it becomes more and more important for brands to include video in their marketing strategy and for us, PPC experts, to include video campaigns in our toolbox.

But here it comes the tricky part, how to measure the impact of online video advertising? And consequently, how to convince clients of the importance of video campaigns?

In 2015, Google shared results of a study on 50 video campaigns from Fortune 100 brands and found that 94% of the campaigns drove a significant lift – an average of 80% – in ad recall. They also measured YouTube’s impact on “brand interest” – interest in a brand as measured by an increase in organic searches for it on Google, and found that 65% of YouTube TrueView campaigns drove a significant lift in brand interest, with an average lift of 13%. So far, so good. However, if we don’t have access to Google Brand Lift what should we take into consideration to measure performance?

Engagement metrics can work as a compass in the video landscape, but we also need to know where we want to go – what goals we want to achieve. Depending on our goals, we should focus on specific metrics and benchmark our results against the average in the same industry market.

As Tina Arnoldi wrote on Supermetrics Blog: “for viewers who are not yet aware of your brand, you may monitor views, impressions, and unique users. In the consideration stage, you would check watch time and view-through rates. And finally, the action stage is the clicks, calls, signups or sales – when people take that action to buy from you”.

The new AdWords interface helps us with this as it includes a ‘Video Analytics’ section that offers deeper visibility on video campaigns’ performance. At a glance, it’s possible to check audience retention, likes, shares and subscribers.

To sum up, I think we should look at video campaigns as a tool that sits at the top of the marketing funnel. If we think of consumers in categories of knowing or not knowing a product, in the stage of weighing different options between different brands, video campaigns play a strategic role.

We may not be able to get an exact ROI to justify investments, but we can for sure measure performance in relation to our end goals and understand what works and what doesn’t.