Tracking Your Distributed Video Content
Distributing video, whether it is on social media or third party platforms, is an indispensable way of developing your audiences. But with so many options available, publishers need to know which channels are helping them reach their objectives. Getting your videos out there is just half of the work: you must measure the performance of the content that lives off your website in order to understand how your audiences are connecting with it. Only then will you be able to continuously evolve your distribution strategy.
Tracking Video Performance
Just like you track and measure the success of your written content, you must obtain all available data so that you can review the performance of your videos. After all, you’ve invested a lot of time and resources in producing videos that will resonate with your viewers – you want to know whether that content is gaining the attention, and the appreciation you’re hoping for. Content distribution requires experimentation in order for you to explore the different channels available and determine which ones are working. The utilization of analytics makes measuring this impact easy and efficient, and is therefore a valuable asset, as well as a crucial final step for any content owner, publisher or marketer.
Utilizing Analytics for Insights
All major social media platforms offer analytics and insights into your social audiences – Facebook Insights, YouTube Analytics, Twitter Analytics etc are all available free of charge. However, the convenience of having the ability to track all your distributed content in one place can save you a great amount of time and effort. Companies like TubularLabs and Delmondo provide the analytics to track all your distributed video content across multiple platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, as well as on all devices. They analyze the viewing habits of your consumers as well as your content, and benchmark your performance against your competitors by taking into account the number of views as well as the engagement of videos.
Consolidating Distribution and Analytics
While video analytics companies provide independent insights and statistics for the entire social video ecosystem, there are tools that consolidate distribution with analytics. Vemba and Brightcove Social allow publishers to edit and publish videos to different channels, and then monitor this distribution through various video metrics.
Brightcove also aggregates your social video analytics with the video analytics of your website or app so that you can compare how a video performed on all of your channels. With these tools, publishers receive insights into the performance of their videos such as a list of the top videos based on views, as well as all forms of social engagement – likes, comments and shares on Facebook and YouTube, retweets and favorites on Twitter etc… This data is used to compare each platform’s performance, enabling content owners to make smarter distribution decisions that will accordingly accelerate revenue.
Connecting Performance to Revenue
The performance of each piece of content can be intrinsically tied to an amount of revenue: ads tied to social video, branded content, and syndicated content are some of the ways content owners monetize video. Understanding and measuring user traffic and engagement with your videos gives you better transparency regarding the real-time incremental revenue generated from each source of traffic (whether that’s on your site, Facebook, Twitter etc).
Maximizing Revenue with Data Insights
While the abovementioned analytical tools give publishers insights into the success of their video content, solutions exist to unify that data with revenue reporting. This information is crucial for understanding the true value of each piece of content that you produce, distribute, and potentially monetize. Companies like Outbrain and Newscred provide the ability to see the revenue value of your content in a single dashboard, all in real-time. They identify which pieces of content, channels, and verticals your users care about most, allowing publishers to intelligently inform decisions on spending and advertising that will maximize revenue.
Calculating Content ROI
Just like with video, not all platforms and not all audiences are created equal. Each platform has its own viewing experience, metrics, and resulting audience. Tracking and comparing the performance of your videos across all of your channels is therefore necessary for understanding which content is most valuable to you and your users. Of course, measuring the effectiveness of your efforts will ultimately depend on the individual goals and metrics you’ve put in place, but firstly understanding how your content performs with your viewers, and then connecting that content to revenue, is the only way to calculate your content ROI and refine your content production, distribution and monetization strategies.
