From cats scared by cucumbers to professionals showing you how to strip down a car engine, the internet is an amazing (and slightly weird) place for video content.
Whether you need help perfecting your downward dog or knowing when to prune your roses, there’s a wealth of information out there. And there’s a large number of businesses capitalising on the seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge and entertainment.
At Net Vis, we understand the power of video content and its ability to reach a vast audience. If you add video to your site, conversions increase. In many ways, it’s a no-brainer. But creating engaging videos is just the first step. You need to measure, optimise, rinse and repeat!
Want to know more? Here we come with some more Net Vis knowhow…
Why are video views important?
Think of video views as a trail of breadcrumbs leading visitors to your business. Each video view represents someone who’s watched your video content, whether it’s an ad, a product demo or a ‘how to guide’. Tracking these views helps you understand your audience’s online behaviour and will enable you to refine your online marketing strategy.
How do I track my video views?
We use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to track video views. It’s a really powerful tool that, when deployed, gathers data on who’s watching, where they’re from and how long they watch for. This is something we can easily implement for you and something that we’d heartily recommend you’re not without if you’re running a video marketing strategy.
What are the benefits of tracking video views?
Well, this is the part we get really excited about. When it comes to video views, there’s a huge benefit to be gained from mining that data to inform your marketing strategy:
Find out about your audience’s engagement with your videos and their preferences. You’ll be able to see how many visitors are watching and for how long. You’ll spot which content specifically resonates with them.
And there’s more. Even their drop off point tells you about how they engage with your content. Do they watch explainer/how to videos all the way through, or do they drop off after a certain point? Do they lose interest in product demos halfway or after a few seconds? All this information is GOLDDUST!
Why?
Because it helps you to tailor your future content.
We all want to know where our customers come from. Perhaps they’re coming to you from a social media post you put up a few weeks back? Maybe it’s via a YouTube or Google search? Knowing how people find your content lets you see which channels are most effective for driving traffic to your business. And that means you can enhance your marketing strategy.
Viewing numbers help you identify underperforming videos – those with a low view count or a high drop off rate. When you know which videos aren’t doing well, you can work out why people aren’t connecting with them and either improve or remove them. A/B testing is great for this – it helps you compare the performance of videos and lets you drill down into the different elements: thumbnails, titles, CTAs. Letting you work out which version resonates best with your audience.
Leverage your video data by . We use Google Tag Manager to track views and Pixel for Facebook and GA4 to build audiences to retarget (give us a call if you need a hand with any of this).
Retargeting is important. It helps to keep your brand front of mind and nudges those video viewers further down the sales funnel. You can even filter that audience further, by only retargeting visitors who watched the entire video or breaking it down by those who watched over a certain percentage of it. (This means you’re not bugging the people who clicked by accident or realised it wasn’t what they wanted, keeping your brand reputation intact!)
In short, video views help drive conversions by letting you narrow your retargeting focus for optimal results.
5. It lets you measure your ROI
As we’ve said before, video content isn’t cheap – it takes money to produce and to promote – so tracking your views alongside your other marketing data (web traffic, sales etc) allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your video marketing and it’s ROI.
Is your video strategy delivering the desired results? Is it worthy of the budget you’ve allocated? Never be scared to remove a video that is taking up unnecessary space.
Paws to reflect:
Video view data gives you valuable insights. It empowers you to better understand your audience behaviour, to optimise your content and to drive conversions through a strategic retargeting campaign.
Video isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to online marketing – but it’s a growing part of the offer, and one you can really use to your advantage. We’ll leave you to the content creation – although we’re always happy to review videos for you, and if it happens to feature a cat with a deep southern accent, we’re all in!
But seriously, if you need some expertise tracking your videos and drilling into the data, then give us a call – we’d be happy to help!
