Your YouTube video’s need to provide real value – that is the foundation for the success of your YouTube marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, even if you have sweated blood and tears putting together a video, YouTube won’t see it as valuable and rank it high in searches unless it has amassed a good number of views and engagement.
More views and engagement with your videos will directly and indirectly translate to profits. So, until the day YouTube can actually see how amazingly life-changing your video is, the feedback you receive from viewers will pretty much dictate the fate of your video, the outcome of your marketing campaign, and the earnings you put in your pocket.
In short, you can gauge your profits from YouTube through the popularity of your videos. First though, you need to clearly define your marketing goals.
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Defining Your Campaign Goals
Whether your YouTube marketing campaign centers on building awareness for your brand or increasing the direct profits you get from ads, you need to define your goals in order to objectively quantify the performance of your videos and correctly assess your profits.
Without goals, you’re throwing darts without taking aim and just hoping you’ll somehow hit the bullseye. In other words, you’re just creating whatever videos seem good at the time, hoping one of them will bring in the results you want.
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Your YouTube marketing goals should be measurable, achievable, specific, and clear. Goals as specific as “Generate more click-throughs to the same landing page ” or “Increase male subscribers base” are good examples of well-defined and concrete goals that will help you determine what evaluation metrics to use in your campaign.
If your goal is to increase your subscriber base, be sure to note the number you currently have before starting the campaign. Same goes with view counts. If you plan to supplement your organic efforts with bought views, you’d be wise to buy high retention YouTube views.
That way, the count really goes toward increasing the value of your video, not just on YouTube but also on Google. Your video will rank higher and that will be a big help all-around to whatever specific campaign goals you have.
Setting Evaluation Metrics
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On YouTube, there are three main types of goals under which you can categorize your defined campaign goals: to increase brand awareness, produce sales, and encourage action.
Brand awareness metrics
When the goal of the campaign is to build or increase brand recognition and recall, then you’ll want to measure:
- Impressions
- Views
- Engagement
- Reach and frequency
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Views is the number of times your video was viewed while Impressions is the number of times your video was seen by users – whether or not they clicked the video to watch it. Impressions also apply to TrueView in-stream ads.
To measure engagement, look at the likes, dislikes, comments, shares, and favorites on your videos. Reach and frequency refers to the number of times a single person viewed your video over a given time period.
Produce sales
If your goal is to drive viewers to your site to buy your products or avail themselves of your services, then you’ll want to look at your:
- Click-through rate
- View-through rate
- Audience retention
The click-through rate is the number of clicks your video got divided by the number of times your video was shown. A click-through rate shows how often people who see your video end up watching it.
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A view-through rate, on the other hand, refers to the number of people who watched your videos (video views) divided by the number of people who saw your videos (video impressions). It tells you the percentage of people who actually clicked to watch your video.
Audience retention is the percentage of your video actually watched by viewers. It tells you if the viewer watched your video through the end or if he abandoned the video, and how long he spent watching it.
Encourage Action
When you want to encourage viewers to take particular actions like head over to your site, sign-up for your newsletter, subscribe to your channel, or register for a free webinar, then you should look at your click-through conversions for CTA ads and annotations, among other metrics like views and engagement.
Because you can easily direct your viewers to your site with links in your CTAs, call-to-action ads, annotations, cards and end screens, you can calculate the number of click-throughs to your site.
Analyzing Your Stats
YouTube has its free analytics service that will tell you how well your videos are performing. The metrics and reports you’ll see in YouTube Analytics will let you know what’s working and what’s not working so you can make adjustments in your campaigns accordingly.
To check your video statistics, you can go directly to http://www.youtube.com/analytics or click your account icon, select Creator Studio, then click Analytics on the left.
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The number of views on your videos is definitely the most telling of all YouTube metrics. It tells you what kind of content resonates with your audience and what kind doesn’t. Keep in mind, the views on your videos may include ad views, because YouTube counts most ad views toward total video views.
Remember, you can get even more out of your marketing campaigns by buying YouTube views. Buy YouTube views from providers that offer high-retention views because watch-time matters in video ranking. It will interfere with your views statistics for sure, but the social proof you’ll get from it will more than compensate. Your massive number of views will become the social proof that tells people your video must be awesome.
If you’re particularly interested in the views that your ads get, be advised that you’ll only get paid for ads clicked or watched by viewers for at least 30 seconds. So, the number of views you get on your videos is totally different from the number of engagements from your ads, in that you don’t earn a dime if you don’t have views on your ads even if you have a million views on the video.
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Your Engagement Report tells how well your viewers are responding to your campaigns because Likes, Favorites, Shares, and Comments require more from viewers than a simple click needed to watch a video. The report will also have your click-through rate, cards and end screen stats.
To get a better view of the strengths and weaknesses of your video, evaluate each minute of your video by looking at the points of inflection on your Audience Retention graph and noting what parts get drops in engagement.
The drops will tell you at which points your viewer got bored with your content or got what they wanted and left. Either way, the data will help you make your next videos better.
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Make Profit Your Ultimate Goal!
Defining your goals is the first step to measuring your profits on YouTube. Whether that profit resulted from your ads or from click through conversions you get, having clearly-defined goals will help you measure the performance of your videos more effectively.
Delve into your YouTube Analytics report and gain some statistical know-how about how to make better videos, that bring in more views and profits in the long run.
Take charge of your profits today, and get that YouTube money!