Page 47 - SKU-000506274_TEXT.indd

26 P a r t I Marketing Your Business Online with YouTube

How Will You Measure the Results of Your YouTube
Videos?

Creating a video and posting it on YouTube is just part of the process. How do you
measure the success of that video?

The first key to measuring success is to determine what kind of response you
wanted. Did you design the video to generate direct sales, either via your website or
800-number? Did you design the video to drive traffic to your website? Did you
design the video to enhance or reinforce your company or brand image? Or did you
design the video to reduce customer or technical support costs?

This is key: To measure the success of your YouTube video, you have to first deter-
mine what it is you hope to achieve. Then, and only then, can you measure the
results:

• If your goal is to generate sales, measure sales. Include your website’s
URL (ideally to a unique landing page) and toll-free number in the
video, along with a promotion or order code, and then track sales that
include that code.

• If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, measure your traffic
(pageviews and unique visitors) pre- and post-YouTube video. Use site
analytics to determine where site traffic originates from; specifically
track the traffic that came directly from the YouTube site.

• If your goal is to build your brand image, measurement is more diffi-
cult. You’ll need to conduct some sort of market research after your
YouTube campaign has had a chance to do its thing, and ask customers
what they think of your brand—and where they heard about it.

• If your goal is to reduce customer or technical support costs, measure
the number of support requests before and after uploading the YouTube
video(s). The more effective the video, the fewer the subsequent calls
for support.

Of course, another way to measure your video’s success is to count the number of
views it achieves on YouTube. This, however, is a false measurement. Just because
many people view your video doesn’t mean that it has accomplished the goals you
set out to achieve. A video with 100,000 views is nice, but it means nothing if you
wanted to boost your sales and it didn’t do that. Entertaining YouTube viewers is
one thing, but generating sales (or establishing brand image or whatever) is quite
another.