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220 Part IV Promotion and Monetization

You get the point. Know what you want to achieve, and then measure that metric.
You might find that a video that outperforms its siblings in terms of views doesn’t
actually deliver the conversions you were seeking—or vice versa.

Tracking Direct Sales

If you’re in the business of selling stuff online, the ultimate measure of a video’s
effectiveness is how many sales directly result from the viewing of that video.
Determining which sales result from which videos is a simple tracking issue. Assign
each video a special tracking code, and include that code in the video’s text descrip-
tion and onscreen information screen. Encourage customers to enter that tracking
code on your product purchase or checkout page, and you’ll know from which
video the sale came.

What’s a good conversion rate? That’s entirely within your judgment; for some
companies, converting 1 sale per 100 views is good performance, whereas other
companies might be satisfied with a 1 in 10,000 conversion rate. It all depends on
the type of product you sell.

In any instance, the total number of conversions might be less important than com-
paring the conversion rates of different videos. If one video has a 0.1% conversion
rate and another a 0.5% rate, you know that second video is five times more effec-
tive than the first one. Knowing that, you can then analyze the why behind the
numbers—what it was about that second video that drove more viewers to become
paying customers.

With this knowledge in hand, you can better focus future videos to include the ele-
ments that made the second video more effective. And that’s the key: To learn from
what you’ve done to become more successful going forward.

The Big Picture

One of the great things about online videos is that it’s easy to track how successful
they are. YouTube includes a wealth of tools that tell you how many people view
each video, how they found it, and how your videos compare to other videos on the
site. You can supplement YouTube’s statistics with data from your own website to
judge which YouTube videos are driving the most traffic back to your site.

Ultimately, however, you want your YouTube videos to result in increased sales for
your products and services. Tracking direct sales is easy enough (by embedding
some sort of unique tracking code in each video), but almost impossible if your
products are sold via traditional retail or wholesale channels. That said, you can get
a hint of how well your videos work by talking directly with your customers via