The Right Growth Metrics
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Because YouTube is not a performance channel, it’s very hard to get internal buy-in without the right metrics.
As a leader, you want to make sure performance is measured the right way so you can judge whether your team is on track to make an impact or not.
But what are the right metrics if you cannot measure linear attribution?
The answer is a set of cascading metrics that ladder up to customers. You might know this example from SEO, where you have leading indicators like impressions, ranks, and clicks and lagging indicators like conversions or revenue. The same is true for YouTube.
I call it the inverted pyramid of YouTube metrics. The leading indicators I recommend are views, subscriptions, average view duration, and CTA clicks.
Lagging indicators can be new customers or revenue from YouTube – again – measured through self-attribution.
The ladder works because leaders can trace the impact more easily over time. When views grow, so should subscriptions and average watch time, but with a time delay.
The Right Conversion Tactics
IMage Credit: Kevin Indig
There aren’t many known benchmarks for what you can expect from YouTube as a channel. One reference I found is that Ahrefs and Surfer convert about 12% of leads and 10% of sales from YouTube, measured by post-purchase attribution.3
YouTube is not a direct or linear conversion channel, but you can still maximize your chances of driving linear conversions.
The problem is that too many companies are very uncreative when it comes to converting viewers to customers on YouTube.
Here are some ideas:
Try to get viewers to watch your other videos instead of getting them to click on your site for videos that don’t reflect a strong purchase intent.
There are auditory and textual CTAs. The auditory ones are spoken or shown in the videos, as opposed to an overlay or text in the video description. Experiment with both.
Incentive users to click a CTA with a lead magnet, like a pdf template or a calculator they can download or use on your site.
The Big Picture: The Big Swing Era
Image Credit: Lyna ™
The challenge with expanding from SEO to YouTube fits into a bigger picture: linear cross-channel attribution is eroding, so marketers need to take bigger swings based on judgment, logic, and qualitative signals.
I’m seeing the same trend across many organic channels: Reddit, podcasting, social media, and also YouTube. We all know there’s a lot of attention paid to them, but the impact is hard to measure unless you advertise.
Why is that?
Privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA and ad blockers limit tracking.
Platforms like Google, YouTube, or Meta share less data with marketers and use more black box algorithms.
Users use many devices to consume content.
More content sharing happens in closed messaging apps like WhatsApp or email.
Organic channels take a long time to show effect (often six months and longer) compared to advertising channels.
One thing companies can try to test the waters is to advertise on the platforms first, and then make a decision to create content for it. But apart from advertising, we’re back in the era when marketers need to take big swings to win.
But the biggest takeaway is that we have to take more big swings based on conviction, logic and qualitative data. Welcome to the big swing era.
1 49 YouTube stats 2024: Engagement, views, revenue (and more)
2 The Changing Face of B2B Marketing
3 Source
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal