Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers writes, “measurement is what makes marketing a science, rather than a superstition.” Succinct, apt, and accurate, given that so many businesses pay good money to have their statistics measured, analyzed, and reworded into something usable. You can keep your ecommerce video production on high, churning out video after video, but you’re wasting your budget if you can’t tell—with viable, tangible proof—whether or not it’s actually bringing you customers or leads.
There are at least ten or fifteen possible marketing metrics to measure your campaigns success—maybe even more. Thankfully, it can be chunked down to three major factors; traffic, conversions, and customers.
Conversions—The Victory
Perhaps the most important metric to keep an eye on is your overall total conversions. According to Forbes, this metric is easily one of the most quantifiable victories for marketers, and it’s a really good indicator of how profitable your current campaign and how effective your ecommerce video production is. While conversions basically means the amount of leads and traffic converted into paying/engaged customers, its specific definition is unique to the marketing campaign. Anything from filling up a form, submitting payment information, or completing a checkout on an ecommerce website can be seen as a conversion.
Traffic: The 4 Major Channels
Direct—indicates how many people went to your site directly without going through a search engine, a link, or an email. This means that only users who know your website’s exact URL and specifically entered it in the address bar will be counted.
Organic—counts the number of visitors who visited your site after performing a search. Regardless of whether they searched your company name and got your website or searched a specific keyword and got your website, both instances fall under “organic” traffic.
Referrals—includes the number of users who got redirected to your site via an external link from other sites. These sites do not include social media networks or platforms like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. “Referrals” only indicates the people who get to your site by clicking an affiliate link on an ordinary content website like blogs, ecommerce sites, company websites, and other similar pages.
Social—is what counts the number of visitors who found and visited your site via a social media platform. People who clicked through to your site from Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and the like all fall under this channel. This is different from “referrals” in the sense that referrals usually come from partner or affiliate sites, whereas social traffic is usually the result of specific social network advertising campaigns.
As you can see, the best way to measure how well your ecommerce video production did for your marketing campaign is to focus on the “social” channel (and perhaps a bit of “organic” as well—seeing as Google is fond of returning YouTube results to the SERP). Admittedly social media marketing is one of the harder forms of marketing to measure. However, you can always count on Google Analytics for more-or-less accurate numbers, and there are a lot of services out there—both free and paid—that can return statistics for you.
Customer Retention
Your customer retention rate is also something worth noting. According to The Marketing Score, how your company’s marketing efforts are “aimed to engage and nurture existing customers” is very important. Most marketers ignore this metric, seeing as the common misconception of marketing is that it’s driven to generate leads and little else. However, common business sense dictates that a solid, loyal consumer base can pay off in the long run.
At the end of the day, you need to know what and how you can assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. There’s no one specific way to measure it. You can sink hundreds or thousands of dollars into ecommerce video production but if even one of these metrics is underperforming, you may find your company stuck in a constant cycle of spending more and more on marketing just to generate the same amount of traffic, customers, and conversions.
