what are the main KPIs in a YouTube campaign?

The most important thing in any marketing campaign is that the results you get from it are measurable, that is, that they can quantify the performance of the campaigns you are carrying out. In Youtube, not only the number of views is useful to analyse our strategy, we need a series of key performance indicators, KPIs, in this post we show you which are the most important.

what is a KPI?

If you have a digital marketing strategy and you still don't know this term, you better pay attention. The term KPI, which stands for Key Performance Indicator, refers to all the metrics that are used to find out if our strategy or our campaign is being effective and productive, in order to make decisions and be able to observe which of them has been more effective than the others or has better fulfilled the objectives set.

We use KPIs in our strategy for various reasons:

1. Thanks to them we are obtaining a large amount of useful information with which we can optimise our strategy.
2. They help us to make decisions, i.e., seeing the results that a certain action is giving us, we will decide what to do with it, whether to change it, optimise it, continue with it... etc.
3. Thanks to the KPIs we can analyse strategies as a whole, i.e. we know if a strategy, in general, has given good results or not.

All KPIs have to meet a series of standard parameters to be a relevant KPI:

1. On the one hand they must be specific, as we need to know exactly what they are measuring.
2. They must be measurable, in order to be able to analyse whether or not an action is giving us results, we need to know this through a numerical figure, it is not enough to say "The photograph has had many Likes", we need to know how many, as in our objectives we will have previously established that we have to reach a specific number.
3. It is also very important that these KPIs are realistic, we have to set objectives that we can achieve, but above all indicators that we are going to use within our strategy.
4. Another parameter that all KPIs should meet is that they should be concise, we cannot digress when it comes to obtaining results or we will not be able to understand well where we are failing.
5. A very important parameter is that the KPIs are continuous, that is to say, we will need to obtain all the information that the KPIs provide us with periodically in order to make decisions little by little during a campaign or strategy and optimise and correct it so that it produces results.

Youtube Campaign

Once you have started with your video strategy through the Youtube platform , the most important thing is to identify the actions that viewers are doing with respect to you. This way you will know what you are doing well and what is failing in your strategy in order to optimise it. Thanks to this, you will reach your most relevant audience and you will position yourself in the top positions when users perform a search.

Now we are going to focus the post on explaining how to achieve this, how to get this valuable information. When you launch a Youtube campaign, the first thing you focus on and what you most want to achieve is views on your videos, that users generate as many visits as possible. But behind a video strategy on Youtube there is much more, not only do we want users to play the video, but also to perform some action.

For this there are three types of KPIs:

• Knowledge KPI: views, impressions and unique users.

• Consideration KPI: rate of complete views and play time.

• Action KPIs : clicks, calls to action, registrations and sales.

Among all these, you should analyse which ones are more important when measuring your campaign, some KPIs will matter more than others depending on what you want to achieve.

how do we measure this performance?

Thanks to a free google tool called Google Ads, you will be able to see the campaigns you have active, by selecting Video Campaigns within All Campaigns, you will be able to see within a drop down menu the performance that your video campaigns are having, which will be automatically completed with the performance data.

Main KPIs within Youtube

We can separate this by categories within your YouTube campaign:

• Views: With this we can see the amount of times users have watched our video or interacted with it.
• Visits rate: With this we get the amount of visits your video has had divided by the amount of times the ad is shown to get these visits.
• Cost per view (CPV): This refers to the amount you pay when a user watches your video for 30 seconds or interacts with it. This is very beneficial for your strategy as you indicate the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a playback of your ad. So you decide how much you want to spend.

2. Click through rate

• Clicks: Indicates how many times users clicked on your video, which helps to find out if your video is appealing to viewers.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Number of clicks received divided by the number of times the video is shown.

3. Engagement Performance

• Engagement: Number of clicks on the interactive elements within your video.
• Engagement rate: Number of engagements divided by the number of times the ad is shown.

4. Reach and frequency

• Cookies: Number of cookies from an individual browser.
• Unique viewers per cookie: Number of times a cookie viewed your video ad.

5. Video viewers

• Video played 25%: How often a video plays up to 25% of your total duration.
• Video played 50%: Frequency at which a video plays up to 50% of your total duration.
• Video played 75%: Frequency at which a video plays up to 75% of your total duration.
• Video played 100%: Frequency at which a video is played with up to 100% of your total duration.

It is very important to see to what extent our video has been viewed, it is no good having thousands of views if they do not see even a quarter of the video.

These and many more are the KPIs that we can find within Youtube to optimise our strategy, do not hesitate to analyse and use all those that are in your hand because there is never too much information when it comes to making a good video campaign.