Measuring online video metrics shouldn't just stop at a click-through rate and number of views. You need to go deeper and analyze how people connect with your brand.
How did your video content make viewers feel? Where does your brand fit in with their life and values? Where do they place your brand? Those are the real metrics marketers should ask for.
Moving Beyond Engagement Metrics
Engagement, too, is no longer just about what your online video is making people do physically but how it's making people feel about your brand and its values.
Click-through rate might be an adequate metric for e-commerce, but it doesn't tell us much about brand values. So, we need new tools to gauge subtle brand metrics in a complex digital media ecosystem.
Brand metrics look beyond traditional metrics to where it really matters, collating search engine data, consumer-insight surveys, and social media buzz.
Four Categories of Brand Metrics
Brand metrics can be organized into four main categories (only one of them is not measurable for an online video campaign).
1. Behavior
- Employee behavior
- Without brand behavior, there is very little brand.
2. Interaction
- How people engage with a brand
- Includes data such as Web traffic, brand awareness, and consideration
3. Perception
- Building a relationship with your customers
- Core trackers: customer satisfaction, purchase intent, and advocacy intent
4. Performance
- The nitty-gritty, lead generation, market share
- Quantitative and qualitative data analysis based on brand interaction, perception, and performance is key to a successful video content marketing strategy.
Google Brand Lift
Part of the Google AdWords suite, Brand Lift helps marketers analyze key brand metrics on YouTube. It measures...
- Brand awareness
- Ad recall
- Brand consideration
- Brand favorability
- Purchase intent
- Brand interest
This is achieved through split-testing and comparing organic search activity as well as through measuring survey data and information across different control groups.
One of the key selling points of Google's Brand Lift is its ability to deliver all this information quickly and accurately, often within 24 hours of a campaign launch. That means that you can react and real-time optimize your online video campaign.
What to Measure
Measuring brand metrics is about going beyond traditional measures and looking deeper into the psychology of your customer, examining their perceptions and behaviors. Perception and awareness have a direct, measurable impact on consumer behaviors, such as purchase intent and customer advocacy.
These key questions from Brand Lift should guide the brand metrics you measure:
- What do people recall after watching my video ad?
- How has brand awareness increased?
- How has brand consideration moved?
- Has the brand alignment shifted positively?
- How has purchase intent shifted?
- Has interest increased? Is this measured in an increase in organic search activity?
Understanding brand metrics will help you tweak your video content, which can be a huge asset. And it seems to be working. Recently Google found that "viewers who completed TrueView ads—watched to completion or at least 30 seconds—were 23X more likely to visit or subscribe to a brand channel, watch more by that brand, or share the brand video."
There are ways to measure brand metrics outside of Brand Lift. You can conduct Facebook polls or use other methods to track organic search.
New innovative solutions to measure online video brand metrics are launched all the time, so do some research into the different services out there.
Where Brands and People Meet
Video content marketing agencies are spearheading a shift in attitudes towards online video and seeing ways in which content can add brand value through engagement. After all, online video content is often where brands and real people have a chance to meet and interact.
For example, Group Brand Director Kacey Dreby from Clean & Clear recently spoke to Google about its video content marketing successes, explaining how the company managed to attract a whole new audience in its market segment through online video. For example, Clean & Clear's successful #SeeTheRealMe online video campaign was all about empowering teenagers. The campaign culminated in a VMAs brand takeover by a 16-year-old.
Monitoring the campaign and its outcome was all achieved through careful brand metrics analysis, reacting and engaging with the brand's online audience members on their terms.
