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How to Measure Success with Vidyard Video Campaigns

There’s a moment that sticks in my mind like gum in your hair, and not the good minty kind. It was a crisp autumn afternoon, a very normal day at the office. Jane, our marketing maven and wielder of endless spreadsheets, waltzed to my desk, her face a cocktail of excitement and confusion. "Vidyard," she announced, as if the word alone would save us from our abyss of uninspiring metrics.

We were launching our first big video campaign, and to say Jane was excited about the potential data would be an understatement. Her enthusiasm sparked a wild curiosity in us, and as we journeyed down this rabbit hole together, we found ourselves on a harmonious path to measure success in ways we hadn’t imagined. Turns out, Jane's jumbled spreadsheets held magic after all—data-driven fairy dust that taught us more than we had ever known.

Knowing Your Goal

Before we delve into the world of metrics and fancy Vidyard features, let’s start where every good story starts—at the beginning. What do we really want? Understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing is key to measuring success. Jane and I sat down, cappuccinos in hand, to define what we wanted out of this campaign.

We realized that pinpointing specific, tangible goals was akin to naming constellations in a night sky seething with stars. Just pretty stars without purpose until your finger’s pointing, drawing imaginary lines. We needed something we could measure—like increasing website traffic by 25% or drumming up leads for our quaint little sales team. Setting our goals was like tuning a guitar; you need to hit just the right note to make everything resonate.

Using Vidyard Analytics Dashboard

Next, enter the beast: the Vidyard Analytics Dashboard. Jane and I approached it with the caution of those who've sometimes accidentally deleted years of photos. We learned to navigate its nuances like seasoned sailors. Here’s how we dealt with Vidyard's trove of numbers and charts:

  1. Fire it up: Once you’re in Vidyard, click on the video you wish to analyze. The dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree, data sparkling everywhere.

  2. Pay Attention to Views: We noticed Jane glued her eyes to the ‘View Count’ metric. It’s your basic popularity indicator—the kind we’d have killed for in high school.

  3. Delve into Engagement: Ah, here’s where the story thickens. Engagement tells you how long viewers are actually sticking around. A 15-minute video that loses the audience after 30 seconds might mean they're less "Game of Thrones" and more "antique shopping channel."

  4. CTAs - Calls to Wake Up: Vidyard lets you plant Call-to-Action (CTA) prompts. Highly underrated, these gems tell a lot about what viewers do next. Click-through rates from CTAs showed us how engaged our audience really was.

  5. Conversion Tracking: This data aside, what you're really after is conversion. It's like making the perfect cocktail—all elements have to come together just right.

Understanding Viewer Insights

Like Jane discovering a new feature in her spreadsheet software, understanding who your viewers are can be a revelation. The Vidyard's viewer insights tool was slightly intimidating, but we managed to love it more than we feared it. We broke it down to become our friend, and it told us tales about:

  • Geo-location Data: Where's your audience coming from? For us, when viewers from distant lands started tuning in, it was like receiving international fan mail.

  • Device Usage: Vidyard breaks it down whether they're Team Mobile or Team PC—crucial for tailoring your videos.

These specs revealed where to plant future campaigns, and we saw it as a window into our viewer’s souls, or perhaps just their browsing habits.

A/B Testing for the Brave

Every campaign should be treated as a living experiment, which is why A/B testing became our playground. We made variations of our videos, spit 'em out in different outfits, and waited to see which captured the most attention. It felt a bit like dressing pets in costumes, only more numbers-based.

Creating variations on a theme, we tinkered with:

  • Thumbnails: We once tested a video with a panda vs. a cat. The cat won. Go figure.

  • Call-to-Actions: Subtle wording changes made more difference than we’d ever guessed.

  • Video Intros: Whether we started with an explosion or a gentle wave determined if they’d keep watching.

Gathering and Adapting Feedback

Feedback—the espresso of the feedback loop. Like sitcom directors in front of a test audience, we paid close attention to reactions. After all, our audience was why we were doing this. If they weren’t satisfied, then neither were we.

From comments to thumbs up or down, everything carried weight. Jane thrived on feedback, a little smirk whenever she saw constructive critiques light up her screen. She led efforts to implement changes based on what the algorithm would allow us to learn. And she learned. Then we learned.

ROI and Real Success

Success can be a slippery devil. You think you've found it only to discover it's shifted slightly to the left. For Jane and me, ROI was an essential, yet the most elusive bug we chased. As Mark Twain allegedly said, “Find out where it is moving to, and beat it there.”

After analyzing piles of data, adjusting and readjusting campaigns like we were tilting the pinball machine with life and our marketing budgets, ROI still haunted us. Eventually, numbers aligned like planets in the sky, and we realized the actual treasure often lay in the lessons learned rather than the gold coins themselves.

Conclusion (of sorts)

So there you have it. Our rollercoaster ride through Vidyard Video Campaigns taught us more than mere analytics themselves. To measure success, enjoy the process, the lessons learned, and realize video is an art and a science. Jane and I still talk about those days, sometimes over coffee, sometimes over something stronger.

The essence of it all? Go forth, create those videos, live those stories, see which ones connect, adjust, test again, and enjoy a few laughs along the way. After all, if you took out everything we didn’t really need, all we’d be left with is the play button—just waiting for one more click.