I think The Man With No Name was sort of, um, gray hat, probably.

Welcome to the first installment of Demystifying Optimization With Teddy Lyngaas.  Teddy is our Optimization expert here at AboutFace.  This is where I ask Teddy about stuff I don’t understand and he explains it and then hopefully I understand it (and if not, I will definitely pretend I do so that no one thinks I’m stupid).  If you ever have any topics in Optimization you’d like us (read: Teddy) to tackle, email me at murphy@aboutfacemedia.com and we’ll see what we can do.

This post focuses on bad guys versus good guys – black hat versus white hat – and what the bad guys are up to.

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John Murphy:  Thanks for taking the time.  So yeah, so basically this all kind of started from the Trutanich thing, right?

Teddy Lyngaas:  Yeah, I think you brought it on yourself.

JM:  (Laughs)  Can you talk a little bit about the black hat, grey hat, white hat, sort of, what all that means?  As far as ethics…

TL:  Yeah definitely.  It’s derived from old westerns.  I don’t know much about old westerns, but apparently bad guys would wear black hats and good guys would wear white hats.  And it kind of evolved from there in the hacking world and later adopted in the marketing and SEO world: the search engine optimization world.

I was actually just reading a couple of articles about how if you just Google “black hat social media” there’s a new term that they call crowd turfing.  And what crowd turfing is, basically, is this billion dollar industry of hiring these people overseas to do mundane tasks.  So stuff like posting user reviews on products, watching videos or clicking on ads or any other internet activity.

So it’s all just trying to dupe the system, because with everyone using social media and peer reviewed or user generated content, anything you can do to kind of shift it momentum and statistics your way is helpful.

I’m just looking at, right now – I just did a Wikipedia search for search engine optimization, and they have a section on Black Hat vs. White Hat.  So this is SEO, and I think they have a good definition of it on here where they say, “An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engine guidelines and involves no deception.”  And, so that is kind of the same thing for social media, right?  If you’re not following Facebook or YouTube‘s terms of use, essentially, which no one reads anyway – black hat.  Even if you don’t read it, though, you can use common sense to know that they are not going to like some of this stuff that’s considered black hat.

Then it says that Black Hat SEO “attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved by the search engines or involve deception.”  One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either the text is a similar color to the background or is invisible.

So, basically, what that means is that Google will crawl websites to figure out what the subject matter of the content.  And instead of having the page show up as what it is actually about, they will put text color that is the exact same color as the background color so no one can actually see it.

Google will actually crawl it and think that that is the content of the website.

JM:  Right right.

TL:  Basically black hat is anything that you are not supposed to be doing that you are anyway.

There are good things you can do and then there are bad things and there are some things that sort of fall in the middle.  That’s gray hat.

All of these technologies are new and we are kind of inventing the rules as we go.  There is always going to be someone out there that is trying to game the system.

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In the next installment, we (Teddy) will talk about more ways people do game the system.

I was surprised to read the statistics in this iMediaConnection article.  Should I have been?  Apparently not.  Video is apparently MUCH bigger than Search.  Check out this excerpt and then go read the rest at iMediaConnection.

 

Quick, which do Americans do more each day: watch YouTube videos or conduct Google searches? Hint: According to Google and comScore data, Americans do one of these activities four times more than the other.

According to comScore, Americans conduct about 12.5 billion Google searches each month. According to YouTube data, Americans watch about 40 billion videos per month. By that math, we’re watching four times as many videos as we are doing web searches.

Here’s a really interesting article and study on social video from the good folks at iMedia Connection – what you spend, and what value you get in return.  Check it out at iMedia Connection.

Since Google bought Youtube back in 2006, the growth and popularity of the video sharing site has been absolutely astonishing.  Today marks the sixth birthday from the first public beta launch.

To mark the anniversary Youtube released the infographic below on their Facebook page. 48 hours of video are being uploaded to the site every single minute of every single day, and people are watching on average 3 Billion videos a day!

Mashable recently published a great article titled “Top 5 Youtube Marketing Mistakes Committed by Small Businesses“  I definitely see all of these from companies of all sizes all the time, fortunately all are easily avoidable.

1. Having Unrealistic Expectations

“No matter how good your content is, you can’t just upload a clip, sit back and wait for people to come to you — you need to have a promotion and distribution plan.”

I don’t know if this is really a mistake or agencies failure to communicate. Everyone’s definition of viral is different and as marketers we need to make it very clear just how difficult it is for content to get seen. Having a video go “viral” is extremely unlikely and gets more and more unlikely every single day. There’s over 35 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every single minute. You need to make your content stand out, every big marketing campaign you see out there usually have a significant amount of promotional dollars behind it.

2. Thinking Small

“There are plenty of small brands that think they need to be a Nike or an Adidas to be successful in social video,” says Wood. “This is simply not true! Any brand, large or small, can score a hit in social video.”

This may seem like the opposite of their first mistake, we spend a lot of time making sure our clients have realistic expectations but that’s not to say viral success is impossible. Shoot for the stars!

3. Treating a viral video as a commercial

“YouTube requires as much thought as any other social media channel and shouldn’t be looked at as a dumping ground for marketing videos,” says Gonzalez. “Everything you post should represent your brand’s personality and inspire some type of reaction from your viewers -– whether it’s provoking thought, laughing out loud or making a purchase.”

Get involved with the Youtube community, I see brands throwing their videos on Youtube and never bothering to log back in to respond to comments, post bulletins, subscribe to other channels and just generally treating Youtube like just another place to host videos and link back to them on their Facebook page. Brands and marketers need to treat Youtube like another viable social platform otherwise their not only missing the point but they are missing out on a valuable opportunity to connect with consumers and beef up their views.

4. Putting All Your Eggs Into One Youtbe Basket

“It’s certainly the biggest, but don’t forget that YouTube isn’t the only online video platform, and it may not offer the best chance of success for your brand. Vimeo, for example, could be considered a more credible platform for creative professionals.”

If you’re spending the time and money to produce quality content, then why not get the most traction possible for said content.  I’m a big fan of syndicating and distributing it to as many places as possible. I use OneLoad from Tubemogul to upload my videos across multiple platforms. It doesn’t have to be as time consuming as you might imagine. I set up email alerts on secondary video sharing sites that notify me when someone comments on a video so I don’t have to constantly log in or out. It’s not that I get a ton of traction from these channels but often time when I do a Google Video search I see videos from Metacafe, Viddler, etc. routinely showing up at the top. Fish where the fish are. Don’t be confused though, Yotuube is still the go to site for online video.

5. Basing Success On View Counts Alone

“Too often, businesses produce videos and hope to get 1 million views. On today’s social web, success isn’t always counted with stats or measured in view counts — meaningful engagement is what matters.”

The beauty of digital marketing is the ever expanding things we can measure so much especially with online video. Although Youtube hasn’t caught up to some of the other video hosting solutions like the before mentioned Tubemogul as far as analytics go we’re still head and shoulders of where we we’re six months ago in being able to measure engagement and collateral views.

Not all views are created equal, the more targeted a view the more expensive that promoted view is going to be. Our CEO, wrote about this extensively in a four part blog series last October.

In addition to the 5 mistakes outline by Mashable, I would add a sixth.

Not optimizing videos for search

You’ve heard it all before, Youtube is the second largest search engine blah blah blah. But neglecting to do basic things like add metadata to your videos can be a costly mistake.  I’ve seen Fortune 500 companies putting videos up and not even bothering to add titles or tags. Youtube’s machine generated transcriptions have come along way in the last year but their still fairly inaccurate. I use these as a template and edit them to ensure accuracy. It’s important to understand the way search engines index video and do what you can to help your content stand out.

Duncan Southgate is the Director of Global Innovation for Millward Brown.  In this iMedia report he discusses a recent report the firm did with YouTube to learn more about how viral video works.  Their conclusions follow.  A stunning total of 86% of all Youtube views are driven by home page ads.  29% of these views are “bonus” views that are driven by these promotions.

This 29% number closely follows our experience in ‘bonus’ or ‘collateral’ views that result from paid promotion.  Remember, the more a video is ‘liked’ and passed along, or other similar videos viewed, the more ROI you get from your video promotion.  Being ‘liked’ stretches your ad dollars dramatically.

Their findings:

“This research clearly demonstrates that paid online promotion generates a “free” incremental viral bonus over and above the paid views. The key findings were:

• YouTube homepage ads are directly or indirectly responsible for 86 percent of all views.
• 29 percent of total views from an ad are “bonus” viral views from advertising on the YouTube homepage, above what would have been expected from the creative.
• Advertising a video on the YouTube homepage ensures that virtually all U.K. ads achieve more than 1,000 views per week, and most (those with higher creative strength scores) achieve many more views.
• Creative strength remains an important factor in total views; there are some early indications that celebrities may be particularly key.

Remember back in 2000 when web Hits were the metric that was used to measure the success of a website?  In those early days of the web, the idea of someone simply requesting a file and therefore generating a Hit was the foundation of multi-million dollar valuations and IPOs.

Of course, Hits are now seen as a silly and discredited way to gauge the value of a web site, web page or anything else on the web. Now the metrics that matter are Page Views, Unique Visitors, Time on Site, Bounce Rates, etc.  Any marketer seriously talking about the huge amount of Hits they are generating through their work these days would be laughed out of the door, right?

This came to mind today when one of my staff suggested that perhaps we at AboutFace are presenting our video metrics in too much detail. “All anyone cares about is video Views. When you talk about engagement, total view times… it just gets so complicated they tune out.”

Unfortunately he is right. But that doesn’t change my opinion that Views are the 2010 equivalent of Hits and will look almost as naive ten years from now. How do we move beyond just talking about Views in order to talk about ROI in video metrics in a manner that actually reflects the value of content to a marketer?

Complicated or not — let’s look at what I don’t think will look naive ten years from now.

What is a “View”?

We’ve blogged before about different social metrics that you can measure in order to track the success of content. But of all the categories that we measure for clients none generate more interest than how many Views our work receives.

The common understanding is that when a video is clicked on a ‘view’ is recorded. But our first challenge is that the View metric isn’t so simple.  As reported succinctly by our friends at TubeMogul, some sites are said to under-count Views, some to over-count Views. Many sharing sites (notably YouTube) adjust View counts in order to address potential spam issues and more ‘accurately’ express a View. In short, a View is not necessarily a View.

But we need to start somewhere, so let’s start with the assumption that a View is defined as a person clicking on a video with the intention to watch it. It then loads up in the window and plays for some length of time.

TubeMogul publishes attention spans across video sharing sites in order to gauge how many people typically watch a video how far.

Did the viewer turn it off after ten seconds? Did they watch another video or take some action after watching the video? Did they have a positive opinion of the video? Who knows.

But this is nonetheless as close as we can get today to what most of us would consider a View.

I believe most marketers stop at video Views as a metric because it is a simple number to manipulate into success (more on this later).  Maybe this is too harsh, and the answer is just that they haven’t thought it through or they don’t realize that they can dig deeper and measure more accurately the effectiveness of content.

But whatever the reason, a View seems to be the 2010 version of a Hit.

Paid Auto-Plays

Even worse, most sites (with one notable exception being YouTube) count “Opportunities to See” (OTS) a video as a View. In other words, what if the video is an auto-play that runs beneath the fold? Is this a View or an impression? We would say it is an impression, like a banner ad. It certainly isn’t a View in the way most of us would understand.

So if you do a paid campaign based on ‘muted auto-play’ “views” remember that most sharing sites are counting these as actual Views. And you can get LOADS of these kinds of ‘views’ for pennies.  But we suggest that, if  you do this sort of promotion, you play fair and subtract these OTS’s out of your totals in order to much more accurately understand what your actual Views are.

And then compare these OTS’s to banner ads in any ROI analysis.  In other words, count them as (and compare them to) Impressions, not Views. We are assuming in this analysis that auto plays are not Views.

Now that those horrid auto-plays are off of the table…

Next >>

Cost per Video View

What does a View cost and what is a View worth?

I will leave the latter question for another day because, frankly, there is no way to answer that question simply and for all clients. A View of your video content is probably worth more if you are selling a Toyota Prius than if you are selling socks. Only the marketer can answer this, and only on a case by case basis.

But we CAN apply some universal assumptions to understand what a View costs.

We first started reporting Cost Per View to our clients when we founded AboutFace in 2007. In those days we basically added up all the costs a client incurred to get people to watch any videos we were promoting and then divided it amongst the Views that occurred.  So, if an e-mail campaign cost $10,000 and resulted in 20,000 Views, the CPV was $0.50.

CPV is now a metric you are beginning to see all the time, thanks primarily to YouTube using it as a key metric for their promoted videos.

In fact, BrightRoll recently surveyed marketers on their projected use of video in 2011 and 45% of respondents said they would most like to base online ad spend on cost per video view (CPV) while 34% said cost per engagement (CPE) and 16% said cost per impression (CPI).

Clearly the idea of relating a cost per view has caught on. However, since 2007 our ability to achieve those Views and measure their cost has come a long way.

You want to go viral?  Write a check.

Not to be glib, but if you think that you can create online marketing videos so cool that they will go ‘viral’ all by themselves then I suggest you go out and make The Blair Witch Project while you’re at it.  Those days aren’t just over, they never even existed.

The reality is, if you don’t promote the videos through some sort of optimization strategy you probably won’t get that many views, no matter how good the content is.  There is simply too much video out there fighting for attention.

Optimization strategies can include everything from e-mail campaigns to social media outreach.  But the most common and direct of these optimization strategies are pay-per-click type programs from companies like YouTube or TubeMogul.  In simple terms, your video is offered up to viewers who are likely to be interested in the content and if they watch it then you get charged a small fee.

If you still aren’t sure what I mean by a ‘promoted video’ View, then take a minute to watch this YouTube video that will lay it out for you:

It should come as no surprise that all of those videos that you are being ‘recommended’ on YouTube are not just there by accident.

Is this Fair?

Is paying to promote your video somehow unfair?  Of course not.  Promoting your video is no more “unfair” than paying for a Google ad.

Should the resulting Views be somehow discounted? Aren’t they worth less than an organic (un-promoted) View?

Remember that you are simply promoting your content in such a way that, in order to count as a View, someone actually has to choose to watch the content and click on it. There is nothing wrong with putting a sign out in front of your store, which is all these CPV programs do. If someone sees your sign and enters your store, are they somehow less valuable to you then the person who “organically” came in to your store?

You like baseball videos? Well maybe you’ll like this baseball video for Wilson. You like Jaclyn Smith?  Well maybe you’ll like this Jaclyn Smith video for Kmart. Anyone who clicks on these videos and generates the View DOES like baseball, or IS interested in Jaclyn Smith, so how does this reduce the value of the View?

In fact, this type of targeting is one of the huge strengths of online video marketing. Searching for information on dishwashers?  Well, here’s what I just got on YouTube when I typed in “dishwasher”:

The person clicking on either the Consumer Reports or the Whirlpool video and generating the View ARE interested in these respective messages.

It’s really simple… YouTube’s CPV marketing is just like Adwords PPC.  In fact, YouTube will then report to you a CPV (just like they do with a CPC). They typically suggest you anticipate a cost of about $0.75 per View.

Do people still wonder why Google (the largest search engine) paid so much for YouTube (the second largest search engine)?

And even better yet, for me as a marketer, I can virtually guarantee a certain number of Views if I am willing to spend the money to promote the content.  And the viewer who clicks on my video is pre-disposed to be interested in what I have to say. Awesome. I can’t lose.

Unless, of course, people don’t actually like what I’ve just gotten them to click on.  What if that sign on your store somehow misleads the customer into stopping in?

Digging Deeper

How can you get a better idea of whether this View actually did what you wanted it to do? And further, how did the nature of the content (including it’s relevance to the customer and it’s likability) actually effect your cost?

In short, what’s the ROI?

Start by asking questions like: how far did people watch my video?  Did they act on it?  Did they watch any of my other videos?  Did the video relay my message in a manner that I desire?

Which brings me back to my harsh assessment of how marketers like View counts because they are easy to manipulate into a ‘win.’  In simple terms, if you want 100,000 video Views these days, you promote the content until you get those Views.  If you want 1,000,000 video Views, ditto.

A not atypical sampling of comments from a 'viral' marketing campaign.

How do you, as a marketer, protect yourself from wasting money on promoted video content that’s watched for a few seconds before being turned off by a disenchanted viewer?

Or even worse, how do you avoid so-called ‘viral video’ campaigns that are promoted through a CPV campaign and then touted by your agency as a ‘viral success’ even though people seldom passed it along because it didn’t appeal to them?

Just take a look at the comments for most viral video campaigns and you’ll likely find numerous “this is the dumbest thing I ever saw” type of responses, yet there are hundreds of thousands of Views.

How is this helping you?

Let’s face it, no agency wants to report to you that “we promoted the video we created with lots of your money, got millions of people to click on it and they mostly turned it off after ten seconds or hated it so much that they told us we sucked in the comment box”.

Instead these agencies say “Our viral campaign received 3 million views” as though the number of Views alone somehow measures ROI.

Unfortunately for them, we are going to dig even deeper.

Part 1

Moving Beyond the “View”

We suggest taking into account three measurements to come up with a CPV that much more accurately reflects your ROI:

• COLLATERAL VIEWS.  When someone watches a video, do they watch one or more other videos? Do they embed it on their blog? Do they put it up on their Facebook profile? If you promote a video through a pay-per-view model and receive 100,000 Views but those viewers generate another 50,000 videos because they like what they are seeing and watch more videos and tell their friends, you now have 50,000 Collateral Views.  At AboutFace we get anywhere from 30% to 100% in additional views due to these Collateral Views.

• ENGAGEMENT RATIO.  How much of the video did they watch?  There are a lot of ways to tackle this, such as time viewed, a percentage of video viewed, etc. At AboutFace we typically deploy videos in the two minute range, so we count a View as ‘engaged’ if someone watches at least one minute of the video. According to TubeMogul about 46% of viewers watch a typical online video for more than :60 sec.  For promoted marketing videos this drops to about 23%.  You’ll need to come up with your own Engagement Ratio that makes sense for the length of video your are comparing.  Just make sure you are comparing “apples to apples” when you benchmark against the competition. At AboutFace we typically range between 50% and 90% engagement level, and average 68% — meaning that on average 68% of people viewing our work watch at least one minute of the video.

• COST PER VIDEO VIEW. Yes, we DO believe that the View has a role as the basic metric. And the cost to promote that view is an essential beginning point to gauging ROI. But it is only through the prism of these first two metrics that we measure actual CPV.

Doing the Math

So say a client budgets $100,000 to promote a series of 2-minute webisodes through YouTube pay-per-view.

Let’s start with reported Cost per Video View. Suppose you benchmark against the average YouTube suggested CPV of $0.75, meaning that you can expect, on average, to get approximately 133,333 Views from this spend. Of course, just like with PPC, this number goes up or down with all kinds of factors, such as the quality of the targeting through your metadata and the likelihood people will be interested in what you have to say, but let’s just go with the average.

Now add in Collateral Views. Let’s say that your spend results in 20,000 more Collateral Views for a total of 153,333 views. Your effective CPV has now dropped to $0.65. Nice, huh?

Now factor in your Engagement Ratio. Last year we asked TubeMogul how many viewers typically watch more than 60 seconds of a promoted marketing video that is greater than 90 seconds in length. They reported back 23% as their benchmark. So let’s assume you hit the average — multiply your total views by this percentage and you get engaged views of 35,266.  So, assuming that you don’t count viewers who don’t get to at least the 60 second mark of your average 2 minute video, your new effective CPV is now $2.84.

Yikes.

Engagement: The Wild Card

Notice that the Engagement Ratio is a huge factor in determining the effective cost of your View, so make sure it aligns with how much time spent watching a video counts to you as an engaged View.

The temptation might be to lower this number to increase the effective CPV.  But keep in mind that if you make this benchmark low (say, :15 seconds for a >90sec video) you may be overestimating the actual value of the View.

And if you eventually compare your results (as you should) against benchmarks set by other videos of a similar length, you’ll have to count your competition with the same benchmark of effectiveness.  So lowering the bar will not just improve your numbers but will also improve the results of videos you are comparing yourself to, and is therefore not likely improve your comparative results.

Also, make sure you benchmark against videos of similar length, especially if you are using a “percentage of video viewed” calculation.  It isn’t very helpful to compare those who got 50% of the way through a :15 video vs. those who got 50% through a 5 minute video.  The former clicked your video off in about 7.5 seconds and the latter watched it for two and a half minutes. Are these both equally engaged?  If you compare them using a percentage viewed method, they will appear to be.

Part 1

Part 2

Content Matters

Why do we believe it’s important to measure this deeply?  Because by tracking these metrics you’ll be able to benchmark and report on the effectiveness of the CONTENT and not just the marketing push or dollars spent behind it’s deployment.

It is our opinion that any content that is created with an eye towards being useful and engaging to the customer will work better than traditional marketing messages. So as I go through the following analysis of an AboutFace CPV keep in mind that I am not suggesting that we have some special kind of genius.  The reality is that any marketer can achieve similar results if they focus on the relevance of the content to their customer.

So let’s take AboutFace averages and run it through the same calculation as above to get an effective CPV.

A typical AboutFace CPV campaign on YouTube results in an initial CPV of $0.50. Why so much lower than the YouTube average?  Because the content is highly targeted and created with the goal of being interesting to the customer, not just relaying the marketing message. Just like Google Adwords, the more targeted and appealing the ‘ad’ the more likely to get ‘clicked’. The more likely to get ‘clicked’ the less you pay for each click. So the same $100,000 would typically result in about 200,000 video Views for AboutFace clients.

Then take a typical rate of Collateral Views for our CPV campaigns, which runs between 30% and 100%. That’s right, 100%. Seriously. Why so high? Because if people LIKE the first video they watch, then they watch MORE of your videos. Even better, the more useful or engaging a video is the more likely it is to get embedded in a blog, tweeted about or posted on a Facebook profile. So in this scenario we would typically see an additional 60,000 to 200,000 Views for no additional spend.  Let’s go on the low side and say you now have 60,000 Views plus your initial 200,000 views for a total of 260,000 views, which gives you an effective CPV of $0.38.

Now factor in Engagement. A typical AboutFace campaign gets between 40% and 80% engaged views (watching more than 60 sec). Let’s say this campaign hit our average of 68%. So multiply your 260,000 views by 68% and you have 176,800 engaged views. Your effective CPV is therefore $0.56.

That’s right, $0.56 as opposed to the more typical previous example of $2.84.

In both cases the client paid $100,000 to promote their content. In the first case the client effectively got 35,266 engaged Views.  In the second the same spend resulted in the client effectively receiving 176,800 engaged Views.

The second example resulted in five times more actual value to the client.

Qualitative Responses

Did people “like” your videos?  Some would say that it is impossible to measure likability in any reliable quantitative manner. Others might point to tools like Radian 6 which can aggregate social chatter from RSS feeds and generate various custom reports by tracking selected keywords.

But we would argue that your likability is being measured if you take the time to assess the factors above, because you’ve factored in how long viewers watched the video and how many Views you got from people who watched more videos or passed the video around through social channels. The more people like your video, the more ROI is generated through this calculation.

But, of course, numbers don’t tell the whole story. That’s why we’d also recommend you do a series of simple qualitative snapshots analyzing the sentiment of the viewers when they respond to the videos throughout social channels.

This isn’t so scientific, but it is an essential part of the reporting matrix. Do people say nice things?  Do they seem to find it valuable?

We admit to being seduced by the allure of a well crafted line graph showing keyword trending as much as the next guy, but in reality you can learn as much (if not more) by simply listening to comments than you will by looking at charts generated by Radian 6.

Take Away

If you want to get a relevant sense of the return you are getting on your investment in video content, ask these four basic questions when talking about Views:

• Did someone actually choose to watch your video?  In other words, are you counting actual Views or are you counting Impressions or OTS’s?
• Did they watch enough of your video to matter to you?
• Did the viewer like your video enough to watch any of your other videos or share your content with their friends?
• And finally, what did you pay to promote the video and get that View?

Without taking into account all of these factors, your View count (and the correlating Cost Per View) is a virtually meaningless statistic.

But by measuring these factors, it will soon become clear that deciding what kind of content you are going to offer up through your video marketing channels is NOT just a creative decision.  It’s also a financial decision.

It is, in fact, a measurable, trackable cornerstone of how you generate value from your video spend.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Tubemogul recently published a study that supports our long standing suspicion that their is fraud in online video view counting on almost all video sharing sites.

“For better or worse, publishers and advertisers often measure success of online video initiatives in terms of “views.” While the industry has moved closer toward a standardized metric of what a “view” actually constitutes, it remains relatively unclear.”

Advertisers will put an auto play embedded video usually with no audio on an unrelated site sometimes under the fold.  When someone visits the page often times they don’t even notice the video is playing and even if they do they certainly aren’t watching the video.

Nearly everyone but Youtube counts this as a view.  On most sites a video view just means that a stream started no matter how long someone watches and even may even count someone from the same IP address simply refreshing the page.  I would be inclined to count this as an impression, much the same way we count Blog and Twitter Impressions but definitely not a legitimate video view.

Jim Louderback, who has “railed against the industry practice of counting a play-start — and particularly an automatically initiated play start, as a video view.” calls this an OTS or “Opportunity to See.”

Online video metrics have come along way in the past 18 months, it’s only a matter of time before savvy consumers start paying attention to metrics other than views like engagement.  Are people watching your videos all the way through or are they leaving as soon as it starts?

Brands are constantly looking for ways to measure how successful or unsuccessful they are performing in social media in an effort to improve. There are countless different metrics to consider and even more ways to measure and analyze them. I always encourage people to use the multitude of free tools available as much as possible when tracking their progress.

The folks over at Hubspot are certainley leaders in what they call “inbound marketing” or at least they say they are and have saturated the web with content from blogs, podcasts, videos, webinars, etc which are for the most part quite insightful.

They have developed a couple popular tools to evaluate how you’re doing including the Twitter Grader that allows you to plug your username in and see if you make the grade. Go check it out for yourself; AboutFace Media ranks near the top of the class with a 99.3 out of 100. They even tell you what they consider when grading your account and partly reveal what makes up their algorithm including things like number of followers, follower to following ratio, and update frequency.

But….

Is that really an accurate measure? I would argue probably not. What about engagement? Are your followers @replying you back? Are they even reading your tweets? Let’s be honest your probably not reading everyone you’re followings tweets all the time.

“if you are followed by a person who follows 5,000 other people and you two have never interacted, share very few common friends, and generally don’t tweet about the same topics, it’s likely that your tweets are barely seen by this person, and you probably have little to no influence over them.”

In my opinion a much more realistic measure is your Klout score. In addition to everything Twitter Grader measures, a Klout score takes in to consideration several different engagement factors including Reach, (How far your content has been spread across Twitter) Amplification, (How likely are you to be retweeted? How diverse is the group that retweet you?) and Influence (How influential are the people that list and @reply you.) Check out what makes up their score in more detail here.

I encourage you to see how you rank with both services but I wouldn’t put too much weight on either. It’s important to keep in mind what your goals and remember why you got on Twitter in the first place. As more and more brands try to reach consumers via Twitter just ask yourself; Are you part of the conversation or are you just broadcasting?

PRNewsWire reports in a recent GetResponse study that the more social sharing sites link icons the higher a click through rate will be in marketing e-mails.

“Emails that included at least one social sharing option generated over 30 percent higher CTR than emails that did not include any social sharing options.”

That makes sense to me. The inclusion of sharing options add some legitimacy to an e-mail.  If I put myself on the receiving end of an e-mail I know that there is somewhere else on the web that I can vet this company that I may not already be familiar with.

The Article Continues…

“Emails that included at least three social sharing icons generated over 55 percent higher CTR than messages without any sharing options.”

Wow, 55%! three options!  That’s a big number but won’t that be confusing to the person getting the e-mail?  How will they know which one to click on?

We absolutely want to create as many social connections as possible but only your most valuable brand ambassadors are going to subscribe to your e-mail list, like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter and subscribe to your Youtube channel.  Everyone has their preferred social network, for many it starts and ends with Facebook and that’s fine.  But if your a social media dork like myself it’s a little less formal to follow a company on Twitter and get a dose of what they have to offer aggregated in your normal feed every day.

At this point even the most casual web users have spent enough time on the internet to quickly scan large amounts of data for pertinent information.  If someone isn’t familiar with an icon they simply won’t click on the link in the first place. Who knows? Maybe you will introduce someone to the newest social media start up.

So why are e-mail marketers not taking note?  Your guess is as good as mine.

“60 percent of all social emails included only one sharing icon. Only 11.2 percent of social emails included 3 icons or more.”

If you really believe in your product and know that someone might find your content useful and entertaining, and if someone cares about what you have to say enough to tell a friend..why not make it as easy as possible for them to share it with others on whatever network they prefer no matter how obscure you think social bookmarking is.

Facebook fan page administrators have been screaming for more in depth metrics for months as companies big and small struggle to be noticed in the relatively new space.

Facebook took a step in the right direction earlier this month with the release of weekly Facebook page update e-mails; a weekly digest of page views, wall posts, comments, likes and fan totals.  A welcome improvement from the limited Insights previously available to administrators.

As advertising dollars continue to pour in, the demand for more in depth reporting also rises.  It is possible to set up Google Analytics on your Facebook page but unanswered questions regarding accessibility, functionality and accuracy seem to have created a great opportunity for Facebook itself or a third party developer to fill the void.

Just today Facebook announced that they will trade ‘Become a Fan’ buttons for ‘Like’ buttons, a brand friendly move that will likely increase how many pages you are a fan of like.

Although these improvements are great for companies looking to reach their base and measure their success I wouldn’t put too much stock in the numbers alone.  Much of social media is immeasurable, the value of creating engaging lasting relationships with customers will always outweigh how many bar graphs you can make.

Facebook may not put money in your pocket immediately but the companies that learn to see beyond the statistics are the ones that will likely make a real impact and develop the brand awareness we were all after in the first place.

20 million people become fans of pages every single day.  Are you a fan of AboutFace Media yet?

iMedia reports that by 2012 online video revenue will reach $5.4 billion and come mostly from paid models:

“The fastest-growing ad technique among emerging formats is online video. It will surge nearly 40 percent this year and more than 36 percent in 2011. Marketers remain fascinated with video’s possibilities because of the proven appeal and success of sight, sound, and motion.”

The real question isn’t why advertisers are moving their spending to online video, but why they aren’t moving more of it faster.  iMedia continues:

“…video advertising still accounts for a relatively small share of overall internet ad spending. Compare online video to TV, and TV wins hands down. For every $1 marketers spent on video ads in 2009, they spent $65 on TV commercials.”

So let’s think about this for a minute:  2009’s online video viewership is estimated to be 144 million ~ 72% of Internet users.  This is nearly half of Television’s audience of almost 300 million.  Yet advertisers spend $1 for every $65 spend on TV commercials?

I guess it takes a while to catch up with the sea change of how their customers are consuming media.

You could argue that the total time spent watching video online is still dwarfed by time spent watching TV… and you would be right.  The Average viewer consumption of TV is 4.7 hours per day, compared to the Average viewer consumption of online video is about 4 hours per month.

This means people spend about 35 times more hours watching TV than online video.  But advertisers spend 65 times more money on TV ads.

So, whether you look at total viewers or time watched, the ratios are either 6,500% out of whack (in the case of the former) or 200% out of whack (in the case of the latter).

Now let’s look at the value of those views… what is the relative level of engagement in video ads.  This is where the imbalance in ROI for TV vs. Internet spending gets even gets worse for those slow moving marketers who still rely on traditional TV.

From the Sceneclips blog:

Because online video is a lean-forward interactive experience, viewer engagement is far higher than television.  This will result in marketers continuing to shift ad dollars from television to online video.  In addition, Internet advertising provides more targeting and accountability than TV advertising.  In a tough economic climate, measuring return on investment (ROI) becomes even more critical.

• The average consumer recall rate of an online video ad is 50%.
• The average recall rate of a television advertisement is only 18%.
• Viewers are 28% more likely to pay attention to online video ads than TV ads.

Which is why:

• Currently, 50% of US marketers are using online video.
• 43% of US marketers expect to shift 20% or more of their TV ad budgets to online video by 2010.

From CNET:  Some interesting tidbits rounded out ComScore’s report. According to the company, 84.4 percent of all United States.-based Web users viewed online video. The average viewer watched 10.8 hours of video in October, which is especially shocking, considering that the average online video was just 3.9 minutes long.

RESTON, VA, November 25, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released October 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, showing that more than 167 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Online video viewing continued to reach record levels in October with nearly 28 billion videos viewed during the month, as Google Sites accounted for 38 percent of videos viewed online by Americans.

AdAge has this information rich site with statistics, news, case studies and advices on doing video for the web.

The issue of measuring social media is one that gets a lot of attention these days.  What about a content marketing strategy centered around video?  How can the impact of video content be measured in a way that is useful to brands?

First of all, we don’t consider our work ‘advertising campaigns’, but instead look at our work more like a publishing initiative.  Imagine a “show” or a magazine sponsored by the brand.

For this reason, we look at metrics the way a publisher or a producer would.  What are my ratings? How big is my audience?

So, while we utilize certain social media tools, we use them a bit differently than a social media marketing firm might.

A Dedicated Twitter Profile for the film COLLAPSE

As some background, we rarely use a brands existing social media infrastructure to promote our video initiative.  Instead, we set up a dedicated infrastructure.

Imagine your social media campaign is a “show”, or a “movie”… how do you build fans for your show or movie?

We start by setting up dedicated communities for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc., built around the content.  Just like you would for non-marketing related content, like a new show on NBC.

Here’s a sample of a dedicated Twitter feed from our KmartDesign series.

Also consider, can your “characters” or subjects tweet as well?  Like the cast of Madmen?  For instance, we followed up our KmartDesign twitter profile by encouraging Jaclyn Smith to tweet.

Then we look at our client’s corporate website or social media sites as if it were part of our potential audience.  So, we want the stakeholders of the brands social media sites to be our friend, we want them to publish our content, re-tweet our wisdom, and so forth.  But we aren’t dependent upon their audiences alone.  Make sense?

Now, to get to the topic at hand… how do we measure our work?

• Connections. This is a sum total of new ‘connections’ made in relation to the content.  This could be subscribers to the content, subscribers to an e-mail list requesting content, Twitter followers, Facebook friends… basically any time someone connects with our content by taking action to become a ‘fan’, we count them as a ‘connection’.

• Outreach.  This is no more than an inventory of our efforts to reach out to social media audiences through whatever means we utilize.  Examples would be a tweet, a Facebook post,uploading a video to a sharing site, uploading a photo.  This is kind of like taking attendance… these efforts may or may not show results, but it lets us track the efforts we are taking.

• Audience Engagement. This is the big enchilada:  what response are we seeing from our outreach and our connections?  In essence, what are the results?  This would include items like video views, time of videos viewed, blog or video sharing comments, Twitter impressions, blog impressions and Facebook interactions.  These are our “ratings”, or “ticket sales”, as it were.

In order to deepen your reporting you might consider a number of other items that you can track for clients to give them a sense of the impact of the content.

• Search Engine Equity. Basically, track the emergence and visibility of your content or results that directly relate to your content on Search Engines.  We use the top 100 Google responses to the brand’s name during a given time period.  How prominent is our content?  Assign a numerical value based upon visibility, rank or whatever.  And then track this from week to week or month to month.

• 

  Assign a value to your Search Engine prominence

  Awareness. Decide what keywords relating to your content you wish to track and use a tool like Radian 6 to measure their emergence within social media.  For instance, let’s say you are doing a video series for a dog food manufacturer and people don’t realize that you also make cat food.  The clients goal is to get people to associate their brand with dog food AND cat food.  So you track the emergence of conversations around “cat food” as relates to the overall mentions of the brand as a whole.

• Qualitative Results. Use word clouds and tools like Spezify to give the client a snapshot of how your “show” is effecting the conversation.  Here is an example from our  the KmartDesign campaign on Spezify.

There are a limitless number of ways to get at content marketing metrics.  We use Tubemogul for video views and time viewed, and we use Radian 6 for social media metrics.  And some of this, like Search Engine Equity, is just doing the searches and recording the results in a spread sheet.

Until there are simple admin tools (like Google Analytics is for websites) that track all of the moving parts of social media interaction, there is no simple solution and you will have to work together with each client to tailor a system of reporting that gives them what they want.

From the Hollywood Reporter, the numbers say it all…

LONDON — Internet advertising has eclipsed television advertising in the U.K. for the first time, according to new figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers published Wednesday, which found that a record £1.75 billion ($2.8 billion) was spent online in the first half of the year.

By contrast the research found that television ad spend fell 17% over the year to £1.6 billion ($2.6 billion) in the year to the end of June.

The research that shows that Internet advertising has become the dominant advertising medium in just over a decade. In the first year of the survey, 1998, the Internet accounted only for less than £20 million ($32 million) a year.

The news is a further blow for the U.K.’s struggling broadcasters, lead by ITV, which have seen advertising revenues over the year down between 15%-25%, and will likely lead to further calls for relaxing advertising restrictions on the main channels to be dropped.

The Internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the U.K., while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.

Of the total online spend, search advertising on such sites as Google amounted to 60% of the total, while online classified advertising totaled 22% of total spend.

A fun powerpoint on Social Medai ROI on slideshare.  The images are taken from the cult early 70′s TV show UFO.