Online Video Marketing – Tracking Video Calls To Action

As we continue to market and develop Running Stills, I want to explain how Spork Marketing determined the value of a Running Stills video internally. I’ve already identified the 7 metrics for determining the value of an online video, and earlier this week I talked about the potential value of one video viewer. Today, I’m going to discuss establishing the value of a video by tracking calls to action.

Our Running Stills videos can contain a variety of calls to action. Some videos might request a phone call – “Call Spork Marketing at (720) 318-5459 to learn more,” and in this instance it’s very simple to track direct response. Using our call tracking service, we can embed a traceable phone number in your video. The traceable number seamlessly forwards to your current business number (so the consumer experience isn’t compromised) while capturing the caller’s phone number, call length, and other related data. At the end of the month, we can provide a call tracking report.

However, call tracking isn’t for every situation. In fact, the most common call to action is a request to visit a website, i.e. “Visit SporkMarketing.com for more information.” We recommend this call to action for every video for one simple reason – when a consumer views your online video, they’re probably online. Navigating to your website is as simple as a few keystrokes. The easier we can make the call to action, the more likely it will generate a response.

Tracking website visitors referred from video is slightly more difficult than call tracking and not quite as precise. Still, if we’re clever, we can acquire some good data. The simplest method of video referral tracking is to refer customers directly to our website in our video, i.e “Visit SporkMarketing.com for more information.” Using the basic, built-in functionality of our analytics program (Google Analytics), we can determine how many people clicked on our YouTube profile link, our Yahoo Video profile link, etc. The trouble with this tracking is that many video viewers will type our website directly into their browser. We can make estimates based on associated volumes, but we’re guessing quite a bit using this low-tech tracking method.

As an alternative, we can track video calls to action using a unique URL in our videos. For example, we can ask people watching a video to “visit RunningStills.com for more information,” and then we can redirect visitors to RunningStills.com onto SporkMarketing.com while capturing some referral data along the way. This redirection is also seamless, and the final result is substantially more effective in terms of tracking than the simpler website referral method. Again, reports can be prepared on a monthly or quarterly basis detailing the number of visitors from your video.

Finally, our last call to action is to recommend a walk-in visit. Something like “stop by Spork Marketing at the corner of Wadsworth and Bowles Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm.” This method is impossible to track online, so the business will have to track these visits using a simple “how did you learn about us ” script and/or questionnaire.

Once we have effective tracking in place, finding the value of our video is as simple as relating the value of each action to the number of actions our video generates. If each lead our video generates has a value of $10, and our video generates 20 leads per month, than our video is worth $200 a month. If our video generates 1,000 website visitors a month, and each visitor is worth $0.10, than our video is worth $100 a month, etc.

I feel compelled to point out that tracking is as simple or as complicated as we want it to be. The methods I’ve outlined here are probably good enough for most small and medium businesses, but they certainly aren’t comprehensive…

Let’s say a customer reads about your company in a magazine ad. Let’s say that after reading the magazine ad, the customer visits YouTube and searches for your video. If the customer answers the call to action in your YouTube video, the tracking methods described above might lead us to conclude that the video was the source of the customer…but that would be the wrong conclusion to make. So, in order for any of your marketing to be truly effective, it must all be tracked.

Next, I’ll discuss Running Stills and the value of improved website engagement.