Google Analytics Tools to Help You Measure Video ROI
Both marketers and video producers are often tasked with proving the ROI of video. But how do you quantify the value of video content for a business?
Wistia’s integration with Google Analytics consolidates all the most important metrics in one place, so you can better understand how your video content is contributing to your digital marketing strategy.
When you embed a Wistia video onto your site, playback data is automatically piped into into Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager as event data. This allows you to track your complete video performance, including Turnstile submissions and clicks on annotation links and CTAs — all within Google Analytics.
In order to make the analysis and reporting processes even simpler, however, we’ve put together a couple of handy Google Analytics tools, which Wistia customers on the Advanced Plan can access with just a few clicks of a mouse.
Custom dashboard for video tracking
To try and help our customers take better advantage of our integration, we’ve put together a custom dashboard template, which you can add to your own account just by clicking the link below, and then following the instructions (you’ll need to be logged into Google Analytics, and have admin level permissions for this to work).
Take me to this magical dashboard!
Here’s what it will look like by default, but you can move all of the different graphs and charts around according to whatever numbers are most important for you:
This dashboard pulls in events for all of your video playback and conversion data, and then presents them in the way that we’ve found most useful at Wistia. The charts you get by default are as follows:
- Views - Separated by raw number of views ("unique events") and the number of visits to your website that included one or more video views ("sessions with events")
- Turnstile submissions - As with views, separated by raw number of events and the number of sessions with events
- Top played videos - A list of the videos that have been watched the most within the designated time period
- Top videos by number of leads generated - A list of the videos which have captured the most leads within a designated time period
- Top videos by views with over 75% audience retention - A list of the videos which were watched more than ¾ of the way through
- Top videos by annotation/CTA clicks - A list of the videos which received the most clicks on calls to action and annotation links
- Video completion - A bar graph which breaks down of the number of users who started watching a video vs. those that got 25% of the way through, 50% of the way through, 75% of the way through, and those that completed 100%
Segments designed to prove video ROI
Seeing raw numbers in a dashboard is really valuable for keeping track of your performance over time and improving your video strategy, but it doesn’t really help with one of the major challenges when it comes to measuring video performance, which is proving return on investment.
For (usually B2B) businesses using Turnstile to generate leads, it’s fairly easy to demonstrate ROI by tracking the number of leads captured, seeing how many eventually close, and then measuring the cost of the video against the lifetime value of the customer.
However, for the majority of businesses, particularly those in the services or e-commerce sectors, tracking “leads” in this way isn’t usually very helpful. A more universally applicable way to measure the impact and financial value of on-site video is to measure its effect on conversions and conversion rate.
Custom segments
To aid you in this endeavor, we’ve also created templates for two custom segments, which allow you to break down your web analytics performance based on users who engaged with your video content, and those who didn’t. You can click the links below to add these two segments to your Google Analytics account.
There are many ways in which you can use these segments to break down performance, but one of the simplest and most effective ways is to just apply both segments to a “conversions” report, and compare the average conversion rate for both segments of users.
Here is an example of how this might look, using data from our GA account at Wistia (some numbers removed for privacy):
Through the report above, we can say that users who watch videos on Wistia.com are around ~70% more likely to convert than those who have not watched a video. With this information, we can infer that without our video content, we would be down 1,486 conversions over the period in question. If you’re able to put a monetary figure on the value of a conversion for your business, it’s then a simple calculation to determine whether or not your investment in video has yielded ROI.
More than ROI, however, this data really helps you work out whether, and where, you should be investing in more video content. With the report above, we can see that video viewers convert at a much higher rate. Therefore, we can make a strategic decision to invest time in creating more videos, and trying to get more of our site visitors to watch our videos — by optimizing play rate.
I hope both the above tools help you better measure and prove the ROI from your investment in video content. Let me know in the comments if you have any other questions about tracking video performance in Google Analytics!
