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208 Part IV Promotion and Monetization

Why Tracking Is Important

Why should you bother tracking the performance of your YouTube videos? For the
same reasons you track the performance of other parts of your marketing mix—to
fine-tune your activities to have bigger impact, to measure the effectiveness of your
efforts, and to learn from your efforts when planning future activities.

Let’s look at each reason individually.

Fine-Tuning Your Efforts

You don’t have to wait until the end of a campaign to track its performance. In fact,
it’s a good idea to look at what’s happening while it’s happening, so that you can
make any mid-course corrections that might be necessary.

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve launched a series of YouTube videos but discover,
after the first few weeks, that viewership is much less than what you anticipated.
Why is this? What do you do about it? Can you tweak upcoming videos to make
them more attractive to potential viewers? These are all questions you can answer
now, without having to wait until the end of the campaign. Track the performance
and make necessary changes along the way—this is how you get the most out of
any marketing campaign.

Measuring Effectiveness

At the conclusion of the campaign, you need to measure just how effective it was.
Did the campaign meet your goals? Did you achieve the viewership you wanted?
Was there the expected increase in sales? And if not, why not?

You need to apply the same sort of scrutiny to your YouTube activities as you do to
any marketing campaign. This means setting goals beforehand, and then measuring
the actual performance against those goals. Just as important, you need to analyze
the results to see why your videos under- or over-performed against expectations.
Set a goal, measure performance, and then analyze that performance—that’s
Marketing 101.

Planning Future Activities

Finally, you need to learn from your YouTube activities. If your first campaign
bombed, figure out why and apply that knowledge to your next campaign. If the
campaign was a success, determine what contributed to that success so you can
replicate it in future efforts. Each activity you engage in should be a learning experi-
ence that informs the next activity, and the one after that. Don’t repeat your mis-
takes—and don’t abandon your successes.