How to measure the success of YouTube Influencer marketing campaigns
For many brands, Instagram is a familiar and safe place to assign their influencer marketing budgets. They have an Instagram account, they know who their fanbase is, and they understand how to communicate with influencers they’d like to work with and measure the ROI.
When it comes to YouTube, however, things can become a little more daunting. Measuring how audiences respond to YouTube influencer marketing campaigns can feel challenging and overwhelming for marketers. And that’s because there is a big difference between measuring YouTube influencer marketing compared to Instagram. YouTube is a long-form video platform, and requires the audience to commit to both content and the creator. And unlike on Instagram, YouTube content will continue gathering views over a longer period of time, potentially forever!
Brands just stepping into YouTube influencer marketing might run the risk of prioritising vanity metrics such as views and likes when determining both influencer selection and campaign success. So, we’ve put together a number of ways you can measure the success of your YouTube influencer marketing campaigns, and know that you’re hitting the right metrics for the right learnings.
Audience retention
At what point viewers drop off from your influencer content is a key metric to consider. If a video is 20 minutes long and 90% of viewers switch off after 90 seconds, it's unlikely you’ll deliver your key messages and a decent ROI. Even worse, if your product or service is only mentioned during the middle or end of the video, you won't be seen at all.
It is important to understand the average watch-time of the creators you want to work with. Knowing this will inform talent selection, as well as helping with campaign planning and video format direction.
And in terms of measurement, knowing at what point your product was mentioned and how many viewers actually stuck around to see it will give you the important 'true views' number.
Engagement rate
An influencer’s engagement rate can demonstrate that their content is compelling enough to their viewers to warrant a response. Thus, analysing engagement rate - of both the content you collaborate on, and the general performance of channels you’re considering working with - gives you details about your audience’s interactions (and potential interactions) with your campaign. Factors to look into include:
Likes/Dislikes
Comments
Shares
Channel subscriber change
To calculate a channel’s overall YouTube engagement rate, use the following equation:
((Likes + comments ) / Views) * 100 = Engagement rate in %
Link clicks and conversions
Link clicks and conversions can be great metrics for measuring what your campaign has returned in terms of traffic and revenue.
By adding trackable links to a video’s content description, you can guide viewers to where you want them to go, and then access valuable conversion data. These links can be affiliate links, promo codes, Google Analytics trackers, bit.ly links etc., but all will allow you to see what these visitors do in response to the content you put out.
Audience Demographics
Understanding who viewed your content is vital in determining its success. Different YouTube influencers’ fanbases can vary greatly even, if their content is superficially very similar in style and topic.
If you are a business who only sell your products within the UK, then you’ll need to know in advance where an influencer’s audience are predominantly based. Even if they are a UK-based creator, their audience could be 80% based elsewhere, so audience demographics are a super-important thing to research for talent selection.
Just as important is knowing who viewed your content, especially when working with multiple channels simultaneously. By analysing the demographics of different channel viewerships, and referencing this against link clicks and conversions, you can start to get extremely valuable insight on which customer personas responded best. This will make future targeting and influencer selection much tighter, and deliver way better ROI as you go forward.
Measuring YouTube influencer marketing is unlike on any other social platform. To have long-term success with YouTube influencer marketing, brands need to use all of the tools available to them. And while YouTube offers unparalleled internal insights and analytics, truly understanding them and translating can be complicated but incredibly valuable. As an influencer marketing agency, we share in-depth campaign data and insights that take this level of understanding to the next level. For more information on how we do this and how it benefits the clients and creators that we work with, head to our insights page here.
And if you’re looking for more info and understanding around contemporary video platforms, check out our full guide to how Twitch works too.
