Measuring YOUR Video Ad Campaign's Performance?

The body of research on video ad metric's is still limited..

Recent studies from key players in the world of ad tech tell quite different stories of how video ads seem to be performing, based on completion rates, viewability rates, click throughs and more.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Listening Power?

Although the body of research on video ad metrics is still limited, the noisiness in the data is remarkable given how concrete some of these metrics are.

Nevertheless, those who have followed the industry understand that many complicating factors are at play.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Video Marketing?

One such factor is that each company measures activity on its own platform, which is only a small sample of the broader universe. Lack of standards also has an effect. The digital video space seems to be a constant flux of formats, aspect ratios, ad lengths and determinants, such as whether ads autoplay or have to be initiated, and whether the sound should be on or off by default.

This lack of consensus, coupled with the fact that in many cases each publisher, platform and video ad measurement firm may approach video ad measurement in slightly different ways, with slightly different data sets, also make it near impossible to uncover any universal metric for success.

What is certain is that YouTube and Facebook are the pillars of digital video advertising, with most practitioners using both rather than choosing one or the other. If anything, the question is how to combine each of those platforms with TV, not how to play them against each other.

Related Article: Instagram Marketing For YOUR Small Business?

In the latest episode of "Behind the Numbers," eMarketer analysts Paul Verna and Lauren Fisher discuss digital video advertising effectiveness, and what that effectiveness looks like across different platforms.

This episode is made possible by Criteo.

Related Article: 8 Social Media Marketing Success Stories?

eMarketer's new report, "Digital Video Ad Effectiveness:

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and More," delves into the methods ad industry executives are using to measure the efficacy of video ad campaigns.

eMarketer PRO subscribers can read the full report here.

Nonsubscribers can purchase the report here.

Guest Authored By eMarketer. eMarketer's mission is to help their clients make better decisions in a world being transformed by digital. They do that by aggregating, filtering, organizing and analyzing essential data and perspectives from multiple sources, and delivering insights for clients to act on. Follow eMarketer on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Fractionalized Video Content?

“Although the body of research on video ad metrics is still limited, the noisiness in the data is remarkable given how concrete some of these metrics are.

Nevertheless, those who have followed the industry understand that many complicating factors are at play.."

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Powerful Social Media Success Metrics?

One of the most exciting aspects of digital and social media marketing is also one of the most challenging, since it's always changing..

Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter constantly release new features, policy changes and algorithm updates that influence the way we approach our campaign tactics. The key to optimizing your social media performance is data.

Measuring your results from these campaigns is always a top priority. The main challenge is figuring out which metrics are most important and how to apply them. In other words, it's not just as simple as looking at "likes." Here are the metrics we deem most important for our clients based on campaign type for both organic, unpaid social media efforts and paid ad campaigns.

Organic Campaigns

Link clicks: In Facebook Insights, you can see overall clicks on your posts, but you can also break it down further to see specific link clicks. Link clicks are the most important, because they show the most relevant form of engagement. This tells you your audience is interested enough to learn more, and if they're on your own site, you can track their journey from there.

Related Article: YOUR Organic Social Media Marketing?

A client of ours once wished to boost a Facebook post (an uploaded photo with a link in the text above) for clicks. Initially, he was not pleased since the post received a high number of clicks but a low number of conversions on his site. It turned out that he was looking at total clicks and not link clicks, which required a different evaluation. Since total clicks were so much higher than link clicks, we were able to attribute a significant amount of page "likes" to that particular post. The difference helps you to attribute your successes (and failures) more efficiently.

Reach versus impressions: Reach is the number of people who see a post, while impressions are the number of times the ad was seen. For example, if an ad was shown to the same person twice, it would count as one reach and two impressions. If your campaign goal is to get your ad in front of a specific number of people or get the word out to as many people as possible, then reach would be the appropriate metric to look at.

If your goal is to have your ad shown a specific number of times to your audience to increase brand awareness, then impressions would be a suitable metric to look at. It all depends on what your goal is.

Related Article: Cost-Effective Social Media Advertising?

Platform engagement: Platform engagement here means likes, retweets, shares, comments, follows, etc., and while probably overrated in terms of its importance for driving ROI, it is helpful for appearance's sake in terms of interesting content. Though it's less reliable than link clicks, it can help increase reach and impressions when people interact with your content. For example, if you do work for a networking business where social media brand optics are important to its operations, Facebook reactions become legitimate metrics to keep track of in your campaign.

Paid Ads

Conversions: Whether it's a form-fill, a sign-up or an e-commerce buy, you must have a conversion goal in mind when creating ads. This provides a direct ROI for your efforts, which is crucial. Our first step when taking over a client's Facebook is installing the base pixel on their website, and then setting up the conversion event code that is relevant to them.

By using the pixel to track the journey from the Facebook sponsored post all the way to the purchase screen on their site, we can track people's digital paths.

Related Article: The Social Media Platform For YOUR Business?

Sometimes it's even simpler than installing a pixel code. On LinkedIn, you can use lead generation forms as the goal of your sponsored content campaign, and interested individuals can have a seamless path to contacting your business and becoming a lead. Whether it's ticket sales or lead forms, paid social media campaigns should provide ROI in a trackable way.

Button clicks: On Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram ads, there is oftentimes a call-to-action button, like "Contact Us," "Learn More," "Buy Now" etc. These are the best types of clicks to attain because they show the most direct intent.

In our experience, tracking button clicks is best in Facebook Ads Manager and Instagram for a specific B2B client of ours. Due to its high cost of conversion, we couldn't just use conversions as a metric. We first looked at just link clicks, and they were even across the board. We then looked at button clicks and saw that one ad had far more than others.

This told us that more people were expressing explicit intent to convert, which was effective because the ad with the most button clicks had the most conversions when the campaign ended.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Engagement Metric?

Relevance score: The relevancy score ranges from 1-10 (10 being the highest) and is the best way to see the bang-for-your-buck about how the ad is performing in the Facebook algorithm. It lets you know how effective the pairing of your creative is with your audience and can assist you with campaign optimization.

To test this system, we set up a campaign with three different ad sets, each with identical creatives but with different target audiences. This allowed us to gain insights into which audience was the most appropriate for our campaign goal based on the relevancy score each ad set received. We then targeted the audience that had the highest relevancy score and tested different creatives against each other to achieve the highest reach. There's no use speculating about what audience, creative or strategy might work best when you can just check the numbers.

Social media isn't just some vague, unmeasurable, slight benefit to your business. There are all sorts of metrics to use, and that data can be leveraged to ensure improvement, optimization and overall effectiveness of campaigns.

Guest Authored By Bob McKay. Bob is the the president and owner at McKay Advertising & Activation, digital media masters that help you put strategy first. Follow Bob on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Success Metric?

“Social media isn't just some vague, unmeasurable, slight benefit to your business.

There are all sorts of metrics to use, and that data can be leveraged to ensure improvement, optimization and overall effectiveness of campaigns..”

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Making Your Social Marketing Personal?

Watching the president’s daily tweets, we must see that social media continue to evolve. “There’s this guy named Donald Trump who, if you didn’t know what Twitter was, you do now,” social marketer Jim Sterne says..

Sterne wrote Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment in 2010 – opening the book with “100 Ways to Measure Social Media” (p. xx). We’ve moved beyond measuring “buzz,” as social media managers focus on goals, strategies and tactics.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Success Metric?

Brand marketing communication may be more sophisticated, but Sterne told my Social Media Measurement and Management students that there remains no good way to separate human from chat bot followers, although we can analyze growth and find meaning in context, emphasis and sentiment. “So, the analysis part is always necessary, and measurement is a piece that you use to get some raw material.”

Statistical analysis may help social media analysis develop a predictive social marketing mix model that focuses on outcomes and business value. Sterne’s eMetrics Summit this summer is offered at a discounted rate for educators, and I will be in Chicago with funding from my university’s Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Franchising.

An effective social media engagement strategy moves beyond reach and instead focuses on conversation and relationships. Social media real-time listening helps brands to move in the direction of audience-centered communication – “talking about what they are talking about,” Sterne says. Planning, then, is about meeting customers where they are, and reflecting their words.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Engagement Metric?

Sterne says trusted brand representation, for example, distinguishes between “exploitive” and “meaningful” hashtags, and it requires planning and organization before events happen.

Even for small non-profit organizations with a Facebook page and a website, specific tactics depend upon, “what are you trying to do with it,” Sterne says. Knowing the answer should drive a plan that helps guide measurement goals.

For every brand, there is a “baseline conversation,” and the easiest place to begin is with social media customer service and support, Sterne says. “Let them know that you are available, and make it somebody’s responsibility to respond.” From there, a brand may work on “outbound promotion.” Non-profits have a need to cultivate donor relationships through social media channels. The key is to “learn just enough to engage with them in a personal way, maybe post a fun picture that those people will share with their friends... that’s the power of social.”

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) can be used to raise awareness and spark social media engagement that move people toward desired actions. This may begin with earned and owned media channels that eventually inform an organization how to leverage limited resources for paid and promoted social media posts.

Too often, organizations pay for advertising without knowing the most effective ways to reach and engage brand fans.

"I’m going to go out and engage with people and get them to spread the word. That’s earned attention… Who is your target audience? Where do they hang out? And, that’s how you reach them. So, the goal is first, the audience, second… the channel, and finally the message." – Jim Sterne

Sterne, like a lot of social marketers, suggests photographs, gif animation and video as effective tactics once an organization locates its target audience and social media channels. While marketing ultimately requires great content, it may fall flat with the wrong audience on the wrong channel.

Related Article: Creating Successful Social Media Marketing Videos?

Short, digestible social media content tends to be viewed and shared more often than long-form media. In the competition for marketplace attention, content tone matters, Sterne says. Public relations (PR) may try to push their tone on the audience by crafting messages: “it’s disingenuous, it is hard work, it is not necessarily valuable,” Sterne argues. “The real challenge is not can I get you to take on my tone, but can I take on a tone that’s appealing across the board,… and it’s not corporate speak.”

Related Article: YOUR Fractionalized Video Marketing Content?

We’re just beginning to understand the impact of big data on social media marketing. Cambridge Analytica, for example, has claimed that its highly personal social media data helped the Trump campaign target malleable voters in key electoral states.

Sterne places “an orange flag” on the claims because social media marketers need more research on the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in the process. In the long run, Sterne believes we all will have our own AI “assistant” negotiating with brands about what information to send, and even paying consumers to receive desired content.

Consumer empowerment through personal filtering may take the edge off of data privacy concerns. It is clear that micro targeting based upon consumer needs and wants is the future of personal social media management communication.

Guest Authored By Jeremy Harris Lipshultz. Jeremy is a professor in the UNO Social Media Lab, School of Communication, University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is author of Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law and Ethics, second edition (2018, 2015). Dr. Lipschultz has published books and scholarly articles on media, law, new communication technologies, social media and education. He has been a frequent media source for outlets, such as WGN, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Omaha World-Herald, KFAB, and others. Follow Jeremy on Twitter.

Related Article: Social Media Journalism Platform For Brands?

"Sterne, like a lot of social marketers, suggests photographs, gif animation and video as effective tactics once an organization locates its target audience and social media channels.

While marketing ultimately requires great content, it may fall flat with the wrong audience on the wrong channel.."

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Follow Me Yonder..                     

Social Media Journalism Platform For Brands?

In the traditional media industry, some outlets differentiate themselves through quality, but social media hasn’t gotten there yet — there is no New York Times of social media.”

The modern landscape for newspapers and books resulted from centuries of evolution, but “new media” hasn’t yet developed such strong brands and categories.

However, although there aren’t any dominant players, there are social network companies seeking to stake out “high-quality” territory. The most common approaches are to specialize in either high-quality information, or to specialize in deep, emotional relationships. Of course, people do use existing .coms and social software to manage quality information and close relationships — the beloved chat app Slack is widely used by couples and families, for example.

Related Article: Social Media Analytics Opportunities?

But Slack is generally aimed at the enterprise market and doesn’t specialize in intimate relationships. Similarly, Facebook doesn’t specialize in purveying journalism, even though almost every news company posts articles on Facebook.

Although many companies have come and gone in this space, the problems they’re trying to solve have recently become urgent.

They’re urgent both for the public, which is increasingly aware of social media’s pitfalls — from privacy issues, to trolling, to viral political propaganda — and for social platforms themselves.

Related Article: Fake News, Hoaxes and Hate-Monger Social Media?

Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg himself just posted a long letter on his Facebook profile vowing to support community leaders who use Facebook as a platform, strengthen the news industry, and so on (though this letter also had its critics).

Could specialized social media handle these functions better than the dominant players? What might a high-quality social media platform look like? How about a “warmer” or “more vulnerable” platform?

How about a “luxury” or “intellectual” platform? How about “trade publication social media” — or a platform that serves non-professional yet well-defined niches? And of course: What’s the business model for any of the above?

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Usage Stats?

It’s proven hard to solve these problems partly because of metrics: It’s hard to identify and measure the factors that lead to high-quality information or connection. In fact, it’s difficult to identify and measure quality in media of any kind.

Technologists often discuss the problem of “vanity metrics.”

Vanity metrics are methods of measuring ROI that make product-builders feel good (or make them look good to funders), but don’t ultimately lead to awesome products. In journalism, for example, the pageview is a much-maligned metric. Many publishers count an article’s success by the number of times a page is loaded (partly because many ads are sold based on pageviews) — yet many people argue that pageviews are a vanity metric. Indeed, journalists discontented with the pageview model write articles with titles like “Pageview journalism is killing us,” and refer to the Pageview Industrial Complex.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Bandwagon?

This conversation recently flared up around Medium, a publishing platform with many social platform features, after it laid off 50 people in January. Medium’s founder, Ev Williams, wrote publicly that the layoffs were inspired by Medium’s decision to move away from an ad-supported business model, because “people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention.” In other words, Williams concluded that ad-supported models were encouraging both product designers and creators on the Medium network to focus on pageviews, and that was bad.

In support of Williams’ announcement, one of Medium’s investors, M.G. Siegler at G.V., wrote..

2 billion words written on Medium in the last year. 7.5 million posts during that time. 60 million monthly readers now. Pageviews galore. So step 2 is simply to slap some banner ads on the site, while step 3 is to profit, right? The reality — perhaps hard to see in the midst of such numbers — is that it behooves no one to simply continue down a path if you know the end result isn’t ultimately going to be successful. And so, the prudent yet extremely difficult move is to swallow your prideful metrics and course correct.

..Numbers — even insanely impressive numbers — can deceive. They can deceive when the goal is not actually to build the site with the most pageviews on the internet. It’s not enough to simply be big. That’s part of the equation, to be sure. But just as vital is continuing to innovate on core product and experience while also building a sustainable model to make sure that all sides (publishers and readers) are deriving value — actual value — from the content, for the long-term..

Many other social media platforms are monetized through ads and their views, which makes them vulnerable to the same problems Siegler describes above: Prideful metrics and pressure to scale. And so, just like Medium, there’s widespread pushback against those metrics among companies that envision building social networks to deliver deep value over the long term. In fact, some companies resist this pressure by refusing to take venture money at all, since venture funders can sometimes put pressure on companies to scale fast.

So what are the metrics for high-quality social media?

In the digital content publishing world, I often direct people to the free ebook “The New World of Content Measurement” published in 2014 by the combined content marketing agency + platform Contently. (I wasn’t involved in the production of that ebook, but it’s still good!)

Related Article: The Social Media Platform For YOUR Business?

The ebook identifies both vanity metrics, and metrics that content companies can try if the goal is to deliver long-term ROI. These longer-term metrics are: 1) “Engaged Time” (a reader’s attention, measured by things like scrolling and highlighting); 2) “Readers and Returning Readers” (number of readers coming back to the content, and their engaged time across sessions); and 3) “Average Finish” (the percentage of visitors who finish reading the story).

Can these content metrics be applied to social media?

Some work across both content and social (for example, Returning Users and Engaged Time). Yet these metrics, while arguably better than pageviews, can still lead product-builders astray. For instance, a digital media product might have a high Engaged Time because it’s addictive, rather than because people get deep and long-term value from it.

So: What metrics could measure thoughtfulness, warmth, harmony, or the value of ideas that emerge from a conversation? Perhaps limiting the amount of information that users disseminate through a platform can reduce noise and encourage users to see the act of sharing as valuable. Accordingly, one strategy is to limit users to posting one link per day. Of two companies that have tried this, one of them, This., has folded; the other, Catchpool, is still operating. (Both launched in 2014.)

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Success Metric?

Another way of thinking about noise reduction is to force users to apply to the network, or to focus on specialized material — “trade publication social networks,” if you will. Quibb, for example, both requires users to apply and bills itself as “a professional network to share industry news and analysis” within the tech industry. (Full disclosure: Quibb is a former client of mine.)

Alternatively: If users invest a lot of time helping a community, if they volunteer to maintain or moderate it, or if they pay a subscription fee to support it, then it’s clearly valuable to them, and those metrics are hard to hit but not hard to measure. There are some old-school digital communities that survive on models like this, such as MetaFilter, a community website founded in 1999. MetaFilter used to support itself on Google AdSense, but changes in Google’s algorithm forced it to look for another model in 2014, and now subscriptions are a critical part of MetaFilter’s business model.

Then there’s software like Mightybell, which launched in 2011 to support many niche, focused social networks. Founded by Gina Bianchini, who previously partnered with Marc Andreessen to found Ning (early software for niche communities), Mightybell enables community creators to monetize their communities as they see fit. It offers customizable tools for that — for example, a community creator might wish to use subscriptions, or she might wish to use sponsorships, and Mightybell’s software can support either or both of those options.

In this way, Mightybell seeks to align its business model with the business incentives of users who create and maintain small, devoted communities. As Bianchini said to me by phone, “As a platform for identity and interest networks, it’s our job to make community creators a lot of money. That’s pretty different from targeted ads as a business model. We aren’t a centralized social media feed that tries to be all things to all people.”

From this philosophy emerges a service model for community creators.

This is also expressed in Mightybell’s customizable features, which each community creator can turn on and off — and that means that the ideal metrics might differ from community to community within Mightybell.

For example, Mightybell creators can enable their community members chat in different ways; a creator can choose photos, text messages, videos, or any combination of the three. “The future of shared interest and identity is allowing community creators to customize the platform to enable new connections,” Bianchini told me.

Ultimately, the social platform software that wins territory like “the best information” or “the deepest relationships” may not scale to a billion users — and that might be okay. It may stay small, or scale one small community at a time.

Guest Authored By Lydia Laurenson. Lydia is a writer, researcher, and media strategist based in San Francisco. Learn more about her at her website, Journalism For Brands. Follow Lydia on Twitter.

Related Article: Main Street Small Business Social Media?

"Ultimately, the social platform software that wins territory like “the best information” or “the deepest relationships” may not scale to a billion users.

And that might be okay.

It may stay small, or scale one small community at a time.."

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Follow Me Yonder..