How You Can Use Bitly to Track Video Marketing ROI

Video marketing. It’s kind of a big deal now.

Brands are creating video content for paid social ads, YouTube channels, and placements with third parties. They’re building in-house studios, hiring influencers, and even using drones for cool angles. But what is the ROI of all these video marketing efforts?

If you ask Buzzfeed, video marketing ROI is compelling, to say the least. At the end of 2014, video represented 15% of of the company’s revenue. Now, that number is at 50%.

Revenue from video is a hard thing to measure. You can get a lot of views, but views don’t translate directly to sales. So how can you figure out what video is doing for your company beyond impressions?

Just use a Bitlink!

There are four different ways you can track the ROI of your video marketing with Bitlinks. Here’s how:

1. Ad Placements

Ashfia Rahman, voice of customer, audience insights & analytics at Charity:water, uses Bitly to track the ROI of video ads. While the partner provided the nonprofit with the view counts of the video, Rahman wanted how many viewers click from the video to donate.

By using a Bitlink in the video, she could measure the click-through rate for the ad campaign.

“We saw that the videos drove a lot of eyeballs – with 3 million views on Facebook and 1 million views on Snapchat – but from our end, we didn’t see that many people coming through to our website and ultimately donating,” she explains.

With the data from Bitly, Charity:water had a way to see the customer journey after the video completed and, ultimately, gauge future spend and investment accordingly.

2. Video Engagement Rate

If you want to know where viewers are most engaged, you can use Bitlinks in multiple places across one video. For example, you could put a Bitlink in the introduction, in the middle of the video as a product or service is covered, and at the end when all of the features have been listed.

If you use Bitly Campaign Builder, a feature of Bitly Enterprise, to aggregate all the links in one place, you can easily see the engagement wherever you put the link, breaking up the link per each segment where it’s featured.

This is especially useful data for training or product videos, because you can use specific Bitlinks throughout the clips and see which highlights drive the most action. Even without Campaign Builder, by using Bitly tags, you’ll be able to see where engagement is the highest within your video by using the same tag for each link you use.

3. Tracking Multichannel Video Promotions

When you have new video content to roll out, you’ll want to promote it across a bunch of different channels, distributing it evenly across email campaigns, Facebook, Twitter. Maybe you’ll even want to upload a 60-second preview on Instagram or a shorter clip on Snapchat.

You can use Bitlinks to monitor the engagement across all these channels… and then see the results all in one place with Campaign Builder.

This is a great way to see engagement coming from different channels as you promote the video itself. Rather than just an aggregate of views, you’ll have data showing which channel has the most engagement around a video, what time they viewed it, and where your dollars are best spent for your next round of promotions.

4. Seeing Clicks from YouTube, Vimeo, and Other Third-Party Hosting Providers

If you’re like most companies, your videos are probably living on a third-party website like YouTube or Vimeo. This saves bandwidth and drives a wider reach, but makes it more difficult to analyze the complete customer experience.

Bitlinks can help you solve that, because you can just use them within the description of the video itself. One media company, for example, used video content to promote a recently released album and Spotify playlist. Each of those links with a branded Bitlink, which allowed the team to see how many YouTube viewers engaged with more content.

Without a Bitlink, the brand wouldn’t have been able to see the customer journey after the initial YouTube view.

Interactive Links, In Motion

As video content gets more popular, there are going to be countless new ways to measure and analyze the engagement rate on the actual video itself.

With Bitlinks, you can create a clean, simple way to track not just engagement, but predict the next step in the customer experience. This will give you the data you need to optimize your video strategy in the future and build video marketing content that delivers ROI every time.

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