Peter Boyd is an attorney and the Founder of PaperStreet. He has successfully helped 1,500 law firms with their websites and marketing.
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Your law firm has invested in a great marketing video campaign, but how do you know if it’s having any effect? Who’s watching the videos? Are they driving interest or bringing in new clients? Should you make changes in future videos?
Some of the benefits of video are hard to gauge. You might have impressed potential clients with the personality of your firm in a way that’s hard to measure. But there are some metrics you can focus on to measure the success of your firm’s video campaign.
What Are Your Objectives?
Metrics can give you a well-rounded picture of the performance of your video campaign. But the metrics are essentially meaningless if you don’t understand how they impact your goals.
That means the first step is to understand the goals and objectives of your video campaign. The more narrow your goals, the easier it is to determine the degree to which your campaign succeeded in achieving those goals.
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When it comes to law firms, the goal is usually to get more business. Firms want a return on their investment, and if a video campaign isn’t effective, that will be wasted spend.
View Count
The first metric to consider when measuring the effectiveness of your video marketing campaign is the raw view count. This a straightforward measurement of the number of times the video has been watched. This is also sometimes called the reach of the video content.
When looking at the view count on a platform, remember that it may be tracked differently than on another platform. A view count on YouTube, for instance, could indicate that someone watched an entire 35-second video while a view count on Facebook might include everyone who clicked on the video link, even if they only watched three seconds of the 35-second video.
Play Rate
A similar but more specific metric to consider is the play rate of a video. This measures the number of visitors on a page who clicked “play” to watch a video. This metric is particularly useful for gauging the optimal placement of your video on a page.
If you have 1,000 page views but only two video views, for example, that would indicate that you should move the video to greater prominence. Some locations may be more effective at capturing the attention of visitors.
We have found that videos that are placed on the homepage of a firm’s site tend to get a better play rate than placement on other pages. In some instances, it’s also effective to have the video at the top of a page as opposed to further down.
Engagement
Engagement is a percentage metric showing how much of your video viewers are watching. Average engagement provides the average amount of the video watched by all viewers. Since most people start watching at the beginning, seeing your typical engagement can tell you where people have a tendency to stop watching. This could help guide your content choices for future videos.
Click-Through Rate
Your video’s click-through rate, sometimes referred to as CTR, measures the percentage of viewers who respond to the calls to action included in the content. When they click on a call to action, like a link to a social media page, it is measured in the CTR. If the purpose of the video is to get viewers to take immediate action, such as visiting your law firm’s website, this is an extremely important metric to track.
Social Sharing
If people are sharing your video across social media, this metric measures the number of shares across social channels. This metric provides a good demonstration of the appeal of your video to particular audiences. The more your content is shared, the more views you are likely to gain. The share also increases brand awareness, even if the people seeing the link never watch the video.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is what many people would consider the “bottom line” when it comes to judging the effectiveness of a video marketing campaign. The conversion rate measures the number of leads/potential clients gained through the video content. To pinpoint this specific metric, you often need to combine analytics software and attribution models.
Feedback
Feedback is a metric without automatic numbers. It consists of viewer reactions and comments to your video campaign. Pay attention to what the target audience is saying about the content and their emotional reaction to it. While this is more of a human factor rather than hard numerical data, you could convert some comments to a positive or negative numerical value if you wanted to provide a numerical basis for comparison.
For instance, you might have 10 positive comments and 10 negative comments on a video initially. Then, after making some changes to the video, you might receive 15 positive reactions and five negative comments, indicating that your changes led to a better response from your target audience.
An Expert Could Help You Evaluate And Refine Your Video Campaign
Some metrics are easy to find but hard to understand in practical terms. Other metrics, like your conversion rate, take some expertise to ascertain. A legal marketing company experienced in creating and evaluating the effectiveness of marketing strategies—including video campaigns—could help you better understand your results and how to use the information to improve those results in the future.
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Author: Peter Boyd, Forbes Councils Member
