Video Analytics: How to Harness the Full Power of Video Through Data

Hello and welcome to our webinar Video Analytics, How to Harness the Full Power of Video Through Data. Feel free to ask any questions or utilize the chat function on your right side and we'll be ready as mentioned to go live in approximately four minutes. So stay tuned. Hello and welcome to our Wednesday webinar. Today we're going to talk about video analytics and how to harness video data. With us today, we have two amazing speakers. We have Steen Rasmussen, who is the founder and director of analytics at IIH Nordic. Steen is also an international speaker recognized as a leading authority on digital analytics and a data driven marketing evangelist. And he has received three nominations for the world's best analytics practitioner by the Digital Analytics Association. But let's just tune over to Steen very quickly to say hi. Steen, hi and thank you so much for joining today. Hi and thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here and getting a chance to share the insights. So I've been looking forward to this and I think it's going to be a delightful little tour into some other thoughts on tracking video and what you can get out of it. I'll tune back over to you in a second. But beforehand, I just want to introduce our other speaker today, Christopher. And Christopher is a digital campaign marketeer at Dunaudio and have been running several campaigns and he has been running the very successful video series that they are running over there. Christopher is going to talk a little bit about how to get started with video and how to get started with video analytics in particular. So let's just go and say hi to Christopher as well. Hello Christopher here. So happy to be a part of today's webinar. As Christopher was saying, I have done a lot of video over the past five years and collected a lot of practical insights that I hope to share with you guys. So if you're new to it and if you're starting out with analytics, that you have something where you can just jump straight into it and get off the ground quickly. Before we get started, just quickly myself, my name is Christopher. I'm VP of marketing here at 23 and I'll be sharing a few insights on which metrics that you should and could track when it comes to video and how you can leverage those metrics throughout your funnel and to really have an impact on your strategy. Before we get going, just a quick... Usually when it comes to video, people tend to focus on the qualitative side of things, the communication, the storytelling, the engagement, etc. But when it comes to video and video marketing in particular, it's really two worlds that are meeting and colliding here. It's the qualitative side and it's the quantitative side. Today we're going to talk much more on the quantitative side of things, how to track your conversions, your views, etc. And I'm looking very much forward to this. Let's tune over to Sten, who's going to be the first presenter today. Cool. I'll see if I can do my magic here. And step number two. So if this is not working perfectly, so I will be utterly disappointed, but otherwise I'll try to take it from here. So what I very often see when we start working with data, and this is kind of a brief introduction to the subject, is that we very often take the lazy man solution. So we tend to look at the data we have available and not really take a step backward and distance us from what we got going and do the consideration and saying what do we actually need to be able to meet our thoughts and meet our ambitions. So that's kind of the step that I'm going to try to hopefully inspire you to do today. Take a step backwards from the lazy man solution and a step closer to where the business is. And that's kind of a bit about the story about myself. I'm a senior partner at IH Nordic. We specialize in activating data. So for the last 15 years we've been doing Google Analytics. So I'm also Google Train the Trainer, training other agencies in Google's product. So that just makes me a damn hyper nerd. So back to the subject. Tracking videos. Very often when I meet people, they come to me and they ask me saying, okay, cool, so I have all this data available. I have how many minutes has been viewed. I have my number of video views. I have all this information. What can I do with it? And the challenge is that a lot of these informations are basically what we can call so high level metrics that they're not really operational. To be operational, we have to take a step back and say these are fine metrics. But if you start reporting on this, this is absolutely too high level to have a full operational value. There's a joke in the digital community saying if you're working with search engine optimization, the best place to hide a dead body is on page two on Google. And the same thing can go for data. You can say the best place to hide a dead body in data is in an average or an aggregate because these numbers that we have on screen saying how many videos have been viewed, how many 10-second views and what's the average watch time, well, this is really too high level to be operational. So even though I kind of promised myself, it's kind of making the difference of saying, what do I think, what is the high level number? This is just information. So these numbers, the first set of numbers is basically just the monitor on the side of the patient in the bed. This tells you that the patient is alive. It doesn't really tell you how you're doing. It gives you some numbers. There's still a pulse. We're still alive. We're still showing videos. But the key question is actually taking a step backward and saying, why do we have this video? What are we trying to achieve? And very often we don't really take that step forward. So we just look at the volume instead of looking at the quality. And that's kind of the idea of this challenge today saying, it's fine we have aggregated numbers, but if we want to do something with them, we actually have to take a step closer. And even though I promised myself since the dawn of time that I would never quote Jerry V in a presentation, I think it is important to have this distinction between content. Content is amazing. It's what we produce. It's what we live for. But context of the content is really what is the key thing. Because I could come to you and I could say, cool, I made this amazing video last month. I have 50 million views. And they watch my video from one end to the other. And everybody gave it a five star rating. But the problem is that if these views were not my key audiences, then it basically has absolutely zero value. So value comes from context. And that's kind of the key thing. So to have a model where we can take a step closer is really going in and saying, what are we trying to accomplish? Why did we make this video to begin with? And if we cannot say why we made the video, then we have actually the first problem. But the key thing is actually going in and saying, what are we trying to accomplish? Why did we make the video? So an example in this case would say, OK, we did a video to kind of it's a online product demo. So what are we trying to accomplish? Well, we need signups. We want people to do some specific action at the end of the video. And that is actually the success of the video. It doesn't matter if they see 10 seconds or 90 seconds or see the video 15 times. If they end up signing up, then the video has supported the process. And that's kind of where we have to start working with it and saying, OK, but if that is the objective, how can we then move forward from there? It can also be that a video is part of a series. So the key thing is, do they come back? Do they actually return to watch the next video in the series? So this is mapping the trends. Are we actually engaging people over time? Is the video performing what it's supposed to? And if it doesn't, then this is where we often go in and do testing in different variations of the video, going in and saying, so if we edit the video and serve it up in a different flow, does it change anything? What is the reason why people don't make it through the video? Why do people really love this video, trying to go back and kind of dive into that? So making projections and then going back and actually trying to do the process again. So this is kind of the high level approach to things. So really not focusing on the basic numbers, but going closer and saying, what are we trying to accomplish and how can we be a success with that? So to kind of give an example of that, this is just an example from a video we did where we focused on improving brand perception in the target group. So and we wanted to improve the brand perception with 10 points. So we had something specific in that. So the first thing we did was actually going in and looking at saying, all viewers of this video are not created equal. We actually have a specific demographic that we want to target, but we also want to hit them in a specific place in their purchase process. So this is kind of an abstract example, but I think it goes to show the idea. So first thing is saying how many of the people from this segment, and we targeted them actually by having a pop-up video menu item at the entrance page to the website. So it wasn't tied to the video, it was just tied to the overall experience. So when they came in, we asked them two questions, who they were and why they were here. And then when they traveled around the site, we kind of looked at the different aspects. And one of the things we looked at was the video take rate, saying if you came to this website with this specific objective, then you should see this video. So how many people actually picked up on that and started seeing the video? Of the people who picked on that, of the right people who picked up on that, how many actually did the stuff we wanted to do? How many did and went and did associated actions or affinity actions, which is something that we say it could be saying if you see this video, it would be a really positive signal if you go and download this PDF afterwards, or if you go this and go and see this video, you can go and sign up for the newsletter afterwards. So having a series of activities tied in. And the moment that they left, we caught around 20% of the people on the site and had an exit pop-up again with two questions. So and then it was actually an interesting pop-up because it helped us map a lot of stuff on the site. But the exit pop-up, the first question was, this visit to the website, did it give you a more or less positive impression of the product or the brand in this case? And then we could actually see we had an entrance value, we had an exit objective, and we could see what things they had done on the site to actually change this behavior. So they could come in and they would come out with a bad experience, and we could actually map what elements had tied to that experience. And one of the things that we tied in was the video. So the key point here was that it was actually able to go in and meet the target with the specific groups. And that's kind of the philosophy, saying if by having an approach where we have a focus on what we want to deliver, then it's actually possible to go in and measure very tightly how are we performing. And it might be a more loose objective, but I think in our experience so far, it's actually possible to go and measure most experiences tied into this. The key thing is actually just taking the step back first, saying what are we trying to achieve? And with that, I think that was kind of my seven cents I was able to do on this little amushbush. I'll be here. So if you have any questions, feel free and shoot and share your thoughts. So back to Christopher. Thank you so much for sharing, Stin. And as mentioned, shoot any questions that you might have in the question sections or for that matter in the chat on your right side and we'll answer in the end where we have a long Q&A session. And so thank you so much to the people who have already asked a lot of questions. It's amazing and we'll be sure to make sure to answer all of those in the end of the webinar. But first up is Christopher from Ginaudio, who will be talking in a second here. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much. Stin, I have a couple of questions for you afterwards if you are ready for it. But let's jump into my presentation. And what I'm going to do today is try and have a little more pragmatic view on it. First looking at so if you're kind of new to video, how do you get started and how do you get started without using data? And then when you are up and running and you feel like you have something, how can you use data to actually make sure that you grow and you continue? So, hi, as I said, my name is Christopher and here is the getting started with video and using analytics to optimize those videos for success. So, first of all, why video? I think that's a question that's been answered several times by now. But in my mind, there's so many reasons for us to use video. Customers, consumers, no matter if we're B2B or B2C or just user to user, are expecting video in so many different stages of their customer journey. So what does that look like? Well, we need to provide people with the right resources at the right time. If you go to think with Google, they say that in this mobile fuel shopping landscape, the retailers that thrive see the opportunity to be there and be useful for shoppers in what they call micro moments. That's why I'm talking about the customer journey. We need to be the right places with the right content at the right time. Why do we need to do that? That's because we can provide more trustworthy content. 80% of consumers consult their smartphone before purchase and 70% of them are saying that they're willing to learn about products through video. OK, so with that in mind, I think that it's important to say that one of the key issues for from my point of view is that a lot of people are a little bit scared about jumping into video. There's barriers to this. They are inexperienced with video. There's brand considerations. You have to live up to a brand guideline. You are just one person with an iPhone. Yes, cost is it can be expensive to create video. And then do I have other resources or is it just me? So from my point of view, being a practitioner, being extremely practical, I am sympathetic for those arguments. Yes, experience is important. Matching the brand is important. From my point of view, it's much more about identifying your strengths and opportunities rather than focusing in the start on your weaknesses and threats. So if you're looking at this webinar, you're thinking, how can I get started with video? Should I start with data? I would say start small, make mistakes and learn from them and develop a concept that you think you can scale down the road. There we go. Again, if you're considering, well, I need to live up to certain brand drivers, I think that it's important to say where is it that I can't at all loosen up, identify those places and say, OK, where can I loosen up? We're an audio brand. So when we make videos, it's extremely important that the audio that we record is high quality. So we can't go down on microphones and stuff like that. But we can loosen up a little bit on on the camera that we use, for instance. Make mistakes. I think that's that's the key here is to in the start disregard a little bit your average view times and all that and just say, well, we need to create something, get out there and start learning and find out what works for us. So if I'm to recap this quickly, I think that we need to do video because we need to be at the right place and the right time with the right content. So we're serving our our audiences. And as I said, 80 percent of users, they're using their smartphone to research and video is a really big part of that journey. 70 percent of shoppers are open to learning about your products through video. So it's it's a game where you need to get good and you need to be there because if you're not somebody else is going to be making that video and they're going to be good at it and they're confusing data to to continue to be ahead of you. What's holding you back? Well, as we talked about, it's often that it's it's costly. In my experience, costs and resources and other barriers is just a nice way of going out and doing it. A lot of the things we did, especially ask the experts Christopher mentioned, well, we started out with an iPhone and shut that we started doing doing stuff, learning, communicating with our target audience and seeing does this work? It sounds easy. And to an extent it is because it's about getting out there and there's a lot of ways that you can go about testing this without detracting from your brand. You can do it internally. You can just do it for yourself and start making those learnings and growing as a video marketeer. So the next thing I want to talk about is after this, well, how can you use analytics to to kind of optimize the content that you've started to put out there? From my point of view, we have to look at this because it's a way where we can take the videos that we already have and make sure that they're optimized and as effective as possible. There is when I look at the landscape, I see that there's a lot of people who are trying to make videos that are not as effective as possible. There is when I look at the landscape, a lot of businesses that make one video that just needs to suit everything. And I think that if you dive into the data, you can actually start to say, OK, one video for all formats and all platforms that simply doesn't work. And as Stem was talking about, we also need to find out, well, with the video that I do make and the different formats that I do do. And well, what are the goals for the different ones that we have? As I was saying, different platforms, different behaviors. I think that today it's pretty obvious that we have a very diverse platform landscape. There's your own website, there's newsletters, there's native advertising, Facebook, so many different things. And we all use those platforms differently. Many people go to Facebook just to get caught up on what's new. They just use the phone and go ahead. And we see that in average, people only spend a couple of seconds on each video. If you go to something like YouTube, it's a completely different behavior because you know, you're watching video when you go in there. And we see that in general, people are spending much more time in there. So with that knowledge in mind, we need to also make our content different for each platform. One of the things you can go about that is saying, well, one of the very basic things is. If people spend different times, but averaging different time, you know, just viewing less video on Facebook. Well, does it then make sense to make the full edit available on Facebook? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's a good idea to go in and say, well, let's use those insights that we have that that many people only see five to 20 seconds of video to create a video that is more suited or version cut down of our video that's more suited for that platform. So we make sure that we actually have an impact on the audience that we're trying to capture in the in the amount of time that they're willing to give us. Another thing is that. Just a second. There we go. We can use these insights to inform our post editing decisions. So. If we have a really sharp call to action about we want somebody to sign up for newsletter, we might want to think about in the post editing. If we are saying something about newsletter or saying something about a product that if it's a Facebook video should be really mindful about when we do include that call to action. If we put it into late, well, there's a there's a large risk of us not showing it to the people that we want to show it to. What we do at DynAudio is actually to say we have a full length video and then we look at what are the behavior that people have on each platform. How much time do they usually give us on a platform? And then we use that to inform the different cut downs that we do. So, for instance, a five minute video for our website will get a three minute cut down for YouTube where we rearrange the information that we have to suit the amount of time that people are willing to give us. And then we have 30 second cut down for Facebook or for Instagram. Again, where we think about what information it is that we put where in video. Another thing that we also use insights for and kind of resonated with with what or at least resonates with me in what Sting was saying is that you can use this to evaluate stuff. If you take a step back and you look at so this concept, what is it about? What is the goal that we're trying to achieve? Christopher was mentioning as the expert in Lyon. That is a program where we're trying to share a lot of highly technical information with a target audience that is very interested in. How do we go about making sure that we then use the time that we have with people in the right way? Are we making the videos too long? Are they only giving us 10 percent of the time that they have? And I think that I can see the time is running out a little bit. So the last question here, if you have any any questions about how I would go about using insights to evaluate a concept, please throw that in the questions and let me wrap up so we can go there. So, as I was saying, we need to do video because Shubberz are increasingly turning to mobile and video for that product information. And if we're not there, well, then we're losing out to a large degree. Be pragmatic about it, especially if you're new to the game. I think if you've been doing video for five years, you're going to be looking at this and say, OK, that's pretty simple. And it is. But that's the point for people who are starting out. Keep it simple. And when you start looking into insights, use it. In a way where you can say, OK, this video that content that I've started to create, how can I arrange that differently for different platforms of a different behaviors? And finally, think about dates in a way where it can inform your decisions about how you you arrange your videos. How you do post editing and where you use that video on your different platforms. Thanks. And sorry, Christopher, that was a bit long. No worries. Thank you so much for sharing, Christopher. And we'll get back to you in a few minutes on in our Q&A session that goes also to the end of the day. Obviously, before we get there, I just want to share a few metrics that you can and maybe should measure when it when it comes to video. So hang tight here. So there are a ton of metrics that you could go about measuring, and we're not going to go in depth with all of these. But from video impressions to video plays to engagement to conversions to conversion rates and beyond, we're going to go into the metrics. Video plays to engagement to conversions to conversion rates and beyond. There are so many metrics that you need to consider, obviously, depending on where in the funnel or what stage your viewers are in and what you're trying to accomplish with your videos. The same goes for for the different breakdowns that you can do in terms of measuring your videos by category, looking at trends, looking at when does it actually perform in the day of the week? What sources are actually bringing the right traffic to you? Now, before you go and go into the actual metrics, what is key and what we see oftentimes when it comes to video creation is that it's very form driven. We start with the aspect of we want to create a video, then we find the topic, we produce it, and then we start to look at optimization and the metrics and stuff. Whereas what we really want to do is or should be doing is taking a little bit more strategic approach. As Stine also talks a little bit about where basically we look at what is it that we're trying to accomplish with this video or this series of videos that we're doing. When we actually take that approach and start looking at what is it that we're trying to do with this, then we also can start looking at, OK, how should we measure this? Because it always comes back to what is the success of your video and start measuring that aspect. Now, when we actually talk about the individual metrics, I just want to share a few with you here, one of them being time play analysis. So basically asking yourself, did you create value throughout the video? Are people dropping off? Are they enjoying watching the video? And how does that stack up against, you know, how long the video actually is? If a video is six minutes of what a video, sorry, what, how long are people actually watching this video in average? In that way, you can kind of determine the right length and if people are actually enjoying it. The other aspect here is the play rate and analysis, understanding the impressions to play. Basically, this is a simple metric to utilize to take a look at and analyze whether or not your thumbnails are making people play the video. So, you know, one thing is that you might have auto playing videos on your website, but sometimes that's not the case. And when that's not the case, a thumbnail is super important. And to kind of measure the impact of this thumbnail and whether or not this is driving people to actually click to play your videos. This is a really good metric to measuring. Now, in terms of video marketing and video marketing automation, video analytics is a huge part of this and a good stepping stone along the way. To get started on tracking videos, what I mentioned before is that, you know, you want to look at what you want to accomplish. And oftentimes what you want to accomplish is some sort of conversion on your website and beyond. And one of the things that you can do if you don't have a marketing automation tool or a video platform, what you still can do is basically start tracking your video data in Google Analytics to get one step deeper. And if you go a little bit further, what you can do is basically you can start to correlate your video video tracking. If you're tracking it by, for example, events in Google Analytics and start correlate that with your conversions and your goals in in Google Analytics. In that way, you'll start to see what videos are actually driving conversions. And in that way, you will start to actually see what is helping you out with achieving your goals, which you know, you're hopefully you're utilizing Google Analytics and other tools like that to track. And in that way, you get one step closer to creating an allocation model where video is actually a part of that, because oftentimes video is left out of the equation when it comes to your allocation. And the key question you need to ask yourself is which video and video in general, how is video helping you drive whatever you want to want to accomplish? And once you start getting there, then then it's a matter of asking the questions on integration and allocation. So when when you go to the to the next step, so to speak, in this sense, in the latter of towards video marketing automation, then you can start looking, start looking at video data from from an audience perspective. So not only look so you're no longer looking at just the audience, sorry, the trends and the individual metrics, but you're actually looking at the audience who is actually playing my video. How long is that person playing that video? And when you get to this point, you'll be able to actually start lead scoring based on your video engagement. And then it starts to become really powerful because then you can start not only attributing performance to video, but you can actually start to act based on that behavior. So once you actually start to feed in your data, your video data to your marketing automation, your CRM systems, then you can as this example here, you can start seeing that on an individual level, what videos actually being watched by whom this example is myself where I've watched a number of videos. I watched quite a lot. And when I do this, then I can actually start to attribute points and lead scoring to me and thereby kind of tell where in the funnel I am. How educated am I in terms of of the product, in terms of the service, et cetera, et cetera. And then it really starts to become powerful. So that was a brief, brief rundown of some of the things that you can actually do with video and with data. Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody, for our webinar. As mentioned, I think earlier we will be sharing an on demand demand version afterwards. And I'll try and make sure that we also send out the slide decks afterwards. But thank you so much for tuning in and staying the course of approximately one hour here. And I hope to see you back next time for our next Wednesday webinar. So long and take care. Bye bye.