An Adaptation of our very own Jeremy Albrecht’s recent presentation at UTC Events

Digital media is a great way to tell your small businesses story, and if you are doing it right you can build your brand awareness while improving your bottom line. Understanding how to determine the successfulness of your digital media campaign can be a challenge for many a small business owner. Where do you start? What do you measure? What do all these numbers even mean!?!

While all that data can feel overwhelming at first sight, understanding which metrics to measure from the start will not only help lower your stress level but will help you identify the overall effectiveness of said campaigns.

So Where Do I Start? How About Your Goals

Understanding what you want to achieve with your digital media is a great place to start. Whether you are simply looking to improve your brands awareness or increase sales or leads, having a goal in place before you even create the media asset will go a long way to ensure you will be able to define the ever important questions of “What worked”, “What didn’t work”, “Why” and “Should we do it again.”

-Now that I have my goals set, let’s talk about…

What Should I Measure? Everything!

Ok not everything, but you should measure a lot. A great place to start is “views.” Not every piece of media you create will go viral and that is ok. Having said that understanding the reach is an important metric you will want to track. Depending on the type of media (video, infographic, Facebook post, etc.) you may be tracking traffic, views or how often the video was played.

Next you’ll want to take a look at engagement. This will be different depending on which social media account you are publishing on, but you should include time on site, social shares, time played, comments/reply’s, bounce rate, and likes, pins, favorites etc.

With any metrics you will want to end with conversions (so don’t forget to include a call to action!)

-Ok, Ok I know what to measure, now…

How Do I Track It? Great Question

It will be extremely difficult to measure your campaigns without the numbers. Get started by placing tracking codes on your videos; add event tracking and URL tracking, this will help you capture the views and traffic.
Adding social share buttons next to videos and images that you publish on your site will help aggregate the shares, likes, tweets, pins, etc.  (Oh yea, don’t forget to publish on your site, make sure everyone knows you own it!)

You will also want to make sure you are promoting your content across your social networks.  This will help you expand your reach to those who may not visit your site daily, plus most of the popular social networks have their own analytics tools to use.

-I am glad you brought that up…

How Am I Going to Measure These Metrics? Analytics!

Ok, so you probably already figured that out, but let’s review it here for those who might not be as familiar with how they are going to be diving into the data. So let’s review a few options:

• Analytics: Google, YouTube
• Tracking: Code placed on site, Code attached to URLs you share
• Shares: ShareThis

Google Analytics

Google released their analytics tool to users/website owners to help measure traffic and their sources. By tracking this information you are able to measure a wide variety of initiatives, in our case our media campaigns. A few of the options available through Google’s tool include the following:

Events Overviews

While Google is already tracking a lot of valuable data they don’t capture everything automatically.In order to give site owners more access to how visitors are interacting on their sites they’ve include user generated reports and tracking that can be created by adding some additional information. This is where Events Tracking comes into play.

To review the Events data in analytics you start in Reporting, Behavior>Events>Overview.

Video Events

If you are have included the video onsite (which you should) you will be able to create an Event for the videos as well. To review the video data in analytics you will follow the same path as you did for the Events Overview, only once there you will select Top Events which will bring you to a list of event categories, select the videos to review the information you’ve tracked.

Events Flow

Since you have your Events setup, don’t stop at the overviews, dive in to the Events Flow to understand how your traffic is continuing to interact with your site. This is a great way to get insight into where your visitors are exciting your site, as well as understanding how they are navigating from the event.

You get to the Events Flow section by following the same path as Events Overview, and selecting Events Flow.

YouTube

Did you know that YouTube has its very own analytics tool? Well they do and it has some great data for you to measure. When we talked about what to measure we include views, engagement and of course conversion. Well with YouTube’s analytics you have some great data to parse.

Overview

With the overview you will be able to see a lot of the basic information that includes performance of you video to the engagement, likes, comments, shares, favorites, etc. Not only do you get a great bird’s eye view of the campaign, but you can really dig in to understand more about the users and their interactions with your video.

Demographics

Use the demographics to understand your audience and reach. This includes sex, geography, age and you can even dive into these demographics. Don’t limit yourself to simple reach; if you understand the personas of you target audience, you will be able to measure with effectiveness of your campaign.

And More…

Another great thing about YouTube’s Analytics, is you have many of the same features as Google Analytics. Identify how your viewers are getting to the video with traffic sources, understand when viewers are starting and stopping the videos,  what device are they watching it on and so much more. Jump on in to get a better understanding of how this great tool can help you reach your goals!

ShareThis

Sharethis Social Analysis tool is a great way to dive into social media analytics. With their use of social data you will be able to measure social engagement of the media as well as the online value of said media with the Social Quality Index.

 

We hope this will help you get started when it comes to measuring the overall effectiveness of your online media campaigns. Sadly this is where Jeremy concluded is sweet presentation; if you are in need of assistance setting up your campaigns or tracking/reporting or one of our many other awesome web services contact us at 801-691-7136