How to Use Attribution Video Marketing Metrics that Matter

Tell me if any of these questions sound familiar:

• “What marketing channels are most effective at driving new leads?”
• “Was that trade show worth the investment?”
• “How did that CEO video perform?”
• “Where should we spend marketing dollars next year?”

Constantly fielding questions like these - from your boss, your CMO, and various stakeholders on different teams - is the new normal for marketers. What’s the commonality? These frequent requests are centered around the cause behind performance and return on investment.  You can lump this all under one giant category: attribution.

Simply stated, attribution provides visibility into how much money you spent and the return you received from it. For a very basic example, if you spend $100,000 on search engine marketing (SEM) and you can attribute that money to $150,000 in sales, then your return on SEM is 50%.

As the head of demand generation at Brightcove, my team generates thousands of leads per quarter. But as the sales team will tell you, not all those leads convert. Reporting solely on the amount of leads generated is misleading and not really fair to sales. Lead volume as a metric has its place, but ultimately it is too high level and lacks any context to really determine a marketing program’s efficacy. The same premise applies to video. Measuring video performance solely on video views repeats the same mistake.

Video views are simply not enough. Sure, it sounds good to tell your boss the video she wanted has over 1,000 views - but what does that really mean? Instead of measuring by views alone, here are some common attribution questions as they relate specifically to video content:

• How many of those video views are from the same person?
• Do you know who watched the video?
• How long did they watch it?
• How many times did they watch it?
• When did they watch it?
• What prompted them to watch it?
• Did they take the desired action after watching?

To truly measure a video’s effectiveness you must go beyond the view. Here is a short story about a Brightcove video, that relatively speaking doesn’t get a ton of views, but still returned exponentially more than it cost to produce and was a competitive takeaway.

A prospect from a financial services company in the midwest watched a product video that describes how Brightcove integrates with Oracle Eloqua. After completing that video, he went on to view two other product videos. The prospect watched 100% of all three videos. We know this because we’ve integrated Brightcove with our marketing automation system and could identify who the actual person was watching the video. So, right away, we know a whole bunch of information:

• The name, title, email, and company of the individual
• They likely use Oracle Eloqua
• They likely have more than one video in their library
• They are exploring video platform options seriously because they watched 100% of three different videos

If your current video solution is only providing video view data you’re missing out on all of this rich, contextual information.

However, having this information doesn’t mean much if you don’t act on it quickly. As B2B marketers and salespeople know, leads don’t have a long shelf life. This is where the the behind the scenes magic happens. Integrating Salesforce, Brightcove, and Oracle Eloqua to alert our sales team of a prospect’s video consumption leads to rapid response follow-up.

Let’s review: Brightcove won a mid-range, five figure contract away from a competitor because our platform’s analytics provide insights beyond just video views, and we took that information and acted on it. Remember, the video that triggered the whole process doesn’t get a lot of views to begin with. If we just measured the success of the video by it’s views it would completely underreport the value of the video. Instead, we can accurately attribute a significant portion of the deal back to that one video and correctly conclude that video views do not tell the whole story.

The bottom line? Don’t undersell your videos and their ROI by defining success based on the number of views.