Improve your video marketing with Facebook's new metrics

Facebook has updated its metrics interface for videos, largely by popular demand from page owners and marketers using the platform. Facebook’s 1 billion registered users now watch 100 million hours of video every day (that’s 11 millennia of video content viewed every 24 hours!). While YouTube still reigns supreme as the dominant video platform on the internet, Facebook’s numbers are drastically growing. The vast social implications of the network make each of its video views and interactions worth different amounts than views on YouTube or other less social platforms.

The new Facebook videos metrics page

The older Facebook videos metrics page

Tracking the performance of video marketing on a dynamic platform with a complex network like Facebook can be tricky, and the latest batch of updates helps to make life easier for analysts.

What’s changed?

Total minutes watched

Facebook will now get even more detailed in what they report how videos are watched. Taking a page out of YouTube’s playbook, Facebook’s metrics now show how long users watch a video.

BENEFIT:

Previously, Facebook showed only the number of views, which didn’t fully take into consideration people who viewed half the video before navigating away. This fills in the blanks, and helps to illustrate exactly how valuable and in-depth each view is.

The 10-second view-count

Facebook will now show when a video is viewed past the 10-second mark. And for videos that clock in at under 10 seconds, a view will be counted when a user watches at least 97 percent of the clip.

BENEFIT:

When scrolling through the News Feed on Facebook, videos can easily make impressions on users, especially with autoplay enabled. But impressions are vague and passive, and don’t fully communicate any real value. Facebook can now segment your views, similarly to YouTube, and show info on what works and what doesn’t. Knowing which videos keep users’ attention the longest can help you fine-tune your production, with a focus on engaging and captivating your audience.

Advertisers will be able to take special advantage of this since Facebook announced last summer that they will only charge for ad views over 10 seconds.

Muted videos are now analyzed

Ever been surprised by how high your mobile data usage is in a given month? Facebook videos autoplay by default whenever they are visible on-screen. They play silently (users have to turn up the sound manually to hear the video), but views are logged as long as the video is playing. This is why Facebook metrics now give publishers information on how many people watched the video with the full sound versus those who chose not to enable sound.

BENEFITS:

While some people disable auto-playing videos on the mobile app (mostly to save on data), many users don’t change the default setting. Auto-played views from someone who hadn’t sought out and watched the video on purpose are not quite as meaningful as YouTube views, for example, which necessarily require more action to find and view.

Analyzing the number of sound-on views can help you weigh the value of each view more accurately by highlighting who watched your video with more intention.

Many users enjoy watching videos as they scroll through their News Feed, but often find it more convenient to listen without sound. Learning about the breakdown of your viewers can help you plan your videos. Topics including news, recipes, sports, lifestyle and short how-tos easily lend themselves to having text in the video so that viewers can watch in silence but understand pertinent points.

Not only can publishers get a more accurate snapshot of who is watching, and in what capacity, but this information about users’ patterns can also provide insight about who your viewers are and what marketing techniques work best for engaging them. Marketers are now better equipped to infer whether segments of their viewers are at work, at school, at home, on the go or more.

It’s safe to say that with this update, marketers will continue to increase their use of text and subtitles, as well as modify their videos to be even more reliant on visuals than sound. Head to the Video Metrics section of Page Insights on Facebook to begin digging deeper into your video metrics.

Ben Silverman is Brafton’s Marketing Writer. His writing experience dates back to his time reviewing music for The UMass Daily Collegian at UMass Amherst. Ben joined Brafton with a background in marketing in the classical and jazz industries. When he’s not writing, he’s playing drums, guitar, or basketball.

Improve your video marketing with Facebook"s new metrics

How To Improve the ROI Of Your Content Marketing

While 30% of all marketers reported that their efforts were effective, this … to research done by Small Business Trends and Online Marketing Coach, …

How To Improve the ROI Of Your Content Marketing

5 ways to improve your content marketing on Facebook

The “Boost Your Business” event presented by Facebook is a nirvana for small business owners and those with entrepreneurial aspirations. With Facebook director of small business Jonathan Czaja as the lead guest speaker this year, the event provided advice on how to advertise and find your target audience using the popular social media platform.

According to Czaja, 40 million businesses have an active Facebook page, while 2 million businesses actively advertise on Facebook. The world is going mobile, and Czaja said Facebook accounts for 20 percent of time people spend on mobile devices. Let’s face it; your customers will be one their smartphone’s Facebook app at some point during the day.

Click here to read the September 2015 edition of Business Review USA!

Below, Czaja provided five ways to improve your content while marketing your business on Facebook.

Lesson 1: Tell your authentic story

Understand that people want to do business with those they can trust. You want to be able to build trust with your community. Czaja believes content is the hardest part of marketing, but his golden rule is being original. “Owners should have their own authentic voice and consistently use that voice to communication with your customers,” Czaja said. “Authenticity is what works well on Facebook. Your post will be showing up in between a picture of my son and a picture of my wife. It’s a private space, so you really want to treat that with respect.”

RELATED TOPIC: The 5 principles of engagement marketing: engage people as individuals

Lesson 2: Boost your posts

After you’ve created some authentic content, now is the time to start reaching people on Facebook. The easiest way to start that is by boosting your posts. Here, you can select the audience you want to send your posts to, as well as create a budget. What creating a budget does, is indicate the number of people who will see that post. This can create tremendous success.

Lesson 3: Reach the people that matter to you

The beauty of Facebook is not only can you reach a large number of people, but more importantly, you can reach exactly the people you want to reach. The key is not wasting your money advertising on Facebook to people who don’t care about the products and services you provide. It’s like watching a commercial on TV that you care absolutely nothing about. Part of this is also targeting people in certain geographical areas. It’s a very powerful way to reach people who live down the street from your store.

RELATED TOPIC: Tips to replatform your business website

Lesson 4: Used advanced targeting

This means bringing your website data to Facebook in order to further advance your targeting capability. This allows you to upload your email lists or website visitors to Facebook and, in a privacy protected way of course, find those people on Facebook and target them in your advertising. “This is a very productive way to re-market to your existing customers,” Czaja said. “You can reach your existing customers on Facebook.”

Lesson 5: Measure your results

This is crucial. There are several ways to measure your performance on Facebook, and one good way is tracking the number of purchases made on your e-commerce website that are attributable to your ad on Facebook. With a conversion pixel, which can be installed on your website, it enables you to measure the actual sales generated by your investment in Facebook. It’s very important, because after that, you’ll know if your marketing tactics are working.

This article was originally published by our sister brand,  Business Review Australia, and can be found here. 

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5 ways to improve your content marketing on Facebook

How to Use Widget Marketing to Improve ROI

The internet has given rise to many interesting forms of marketing. Some of them might sound a bit fancy and a bit too farfetched, but they each have their own utilities. Widget marketing is one of those options that are, comparatively speaking, lesser known, most likely due to the lack of understanding about what it is and how it can be used. Let’s take a look at what exactly widget marketing is.

What Are Widgets?

On various websites and blogs, you may have noticed various types of branded panels, mostly on the sidebars. They might be banners, forms or something else. You may even find some websites offering browser extensions or small downloadables like simple games or calendars.

These are small pieces of customizable programs that do not come across as direct advertisements, but fulfil the same purpose (and typically cost less money). Essentially, they are small pieces of code that businesses provide to website owners for display and, in most cases, a link back to their site. Publishers can install them simply by pasting the widget code in specific places and on certain pages.

How Widgets Help:

Traffic and SEO

Why would publishers be willing to install your widget and execute free publicity for you? Well, that is where you have to be clever and give them something in return, even if intangible.

For instance, a travel booking company could create a badge widget and awards its “Top Travel Bloggers” badge to select travel bloggers. The bloggers then proudly display the badge, while the widget maker gets a backlink, leaving both sides happy and satisfied.

Affiliate Marketing

Another excellent technique with widgets is affiliate marketing. A lot of major retail sites such as Amazon and Expedia run affiliate campaigns where publishers display product search boxes or booking forms on their sites through branded widgets from the retailers. If customers use the widgets and end up making a purchase, the publisher also gets a percentage of that transaction. So, it is a win-win situation for both.

It takes a bit of work to set up an affiliate system because you need to track every lead and it must be flawless to avoid controversies and payment disputes. But it can get you excellent ROI because, unlike adverts, you do not have to pay the publishers to have a presence on the site.

Market Intelligence

Some digital marketing and market intelligence sites (such as Moz) offer toolbars and extensions that can be installed on browsers. Users install them because they provide certain functionalities and information in a turnkey fashion. But it also helps the widget owner cleverly capture vital data from the user. So, in this case, widgets provide a free data collection tool, which is probably more direct and cost-effective compared to traditional methods such as surveys and interviews.

A Note of Caution

The first thing that you need to keep in mind is that transparency is the key. Keep the information clean and do not mislead people through the widget. Your leads won’t convert anyways if you don’t deliver on what you promise.

Secondly, keep SEO best practices in mind when designing the widgets. They should be visually appealing, but use clean code with HTML or JQuery that is detected by search engines. Otherwise, you will derive no SEO benefits from it, as search engines will not register the back links.

Finally, make sure that you also develop a fool-proof mechanism for tracking all the activities emanating from widgets and work to keep improving them based on your analysis of the data they provide.

In terms of ROI, widgets can be an excellent option because if you do it well, it can result in less costly leads and traffic. Furthermore, they are generally long lasting and keep sending traffic for years once you get them running. They can also be a good source of market intelligence. All in all, you can benefit greatly from widgets, but they must be deployed as a part of an intentional, long-term strategy in order to make the most of the marketing opportunities they present.

How to Use Widget Marketing to Improve ROI

Retailers have room to improve their online cart completion messages

Reminder emails for cart abandoners lack details on shipping, total price and the ability to add items, a new study finds.

E-retailers are trying everything from sending email reminders to offering quick links to customer service to spur purchases from the 40% of online shoppers who leave items in their online shopping carts to view later or buy in a store, a survey released this week by Bronto Software shows.

But while three times as many  retailers (41%) used cart reminders today than in 2013, only 5% of retailers included shipping amounts or options in the reminders, and none showed shipping duration, according to the email service provider’s “Revenue Rescue: Saving Sales When Shoppers Stray” study, done in partnership with e-commerce software provider Demandware.

Further, 56% of retailers surveyed failed to show the price of the products in the cart and 91% avoided showing the order total in the reminders, the study shows. While these details could create a perception of cost and delay, Bronto urges retailers to tell shoppers about such options as expedited shipping, shipping upgrades or in-store pick-up that could help shoppers get their items sooner.

Retailers also could improve the subject lines in the reminders they send, the study shows. Only 5% of retailers reference an incentive in the subject line or mention the product or product category of the items left in a shopping cart, the study shows.

One in five retailers did use some form of urgency to encourage shoppers to revisit their cart, however. That message often mentioned the importance of getting the item before it ran out, while 84% showed a photo of the product left behind and a link (86%) to that product, the study shows.

More than half (53%) of retailers feature customer service details in their cart reminders.

Bronto recommends that retailers offer shoppers a way to immediately start the checkout process from the cart preview, as well as a link to the full shopping cart so the shopper can edit or review additional information. Nearly one in four (23%) retailers did not give shoppers a way to change the quantity of the product they had left in the cart, and only 7% gave shoppers a way to change product attributes such as color or size.

Retailers could also benefit from making the checkout process less tedious, Bronto says. The average number of pages between placing items in a cart and confirming an order is 5.5, with no retailers providing a truly single-page checkout, the study shows.

And retailers would do well to tell shoppers that their information is secure, how it’s being used for marketing purposes and how their payment information is processed, Bronto recommends.

More than half (51%) of retailers mentioned no site and order security during checkout, the study shows.

Bronto recommends retailers test timing and content to find the optimal balance that boosts sales without annoying or frustrating shoppers.

Bronto and Demandware randomly surveyed more than 100 retailers from more than 500 brands. Bronto provides email marketing services for 112 retailers in the Internet Retailer Top 1,000. Demandware, which offers multiple services for online retailers, is the e-commerce platform provider for 52 of the Top 1,000, Top500Guide.com data shows. The total set of retailers and the sample used may include Bronto or Demandware clients, but any inclusion is random, the companies said.

Retailers have room to improve their online cart completion messages