9 ways to measure and improve your SaaS Video ROI

We see that you have decided to go the video-way for your SaaS business’s marketing efforts. So far so good. Merely hitching on the video bandwagon, however, is not going to ensure the success of your marketing campaign.

The trick is to first identify the key metrics to measure and evaluate your ROI based on them from time to time, which will allow you to course-correct your marketing campaigns.

Content Beta has been helping top SaaS companies to produce video content that gives the best bang for their buck. That means we have the right credentials to guide you in this matter. But before we do that, let’s examine:

Why video marketing is invaluable to SaaS companies?

Sure, hacks can get you on the coveted first page of Google. It is one thing to rank on the first page of Google SERPs, but quite another to hold on to that position. And Google is always refining their search algorithms, prioritizing those parameters which produce the best search results.

Creating relevant and valuable content gives you your best chance of being in Google’s good books (SERPs in our case). And the best way to do it is understanding what your audience wants and give it to them consistently.

In the past, the written word ruled the roost. But with the average human attention span shrinking, marketers are scrambling to devise new ways to provide value to consumers.

And creating attractive, useful, and relevant content is a criterion that will never change. After all, THAT is why people search on Google in the first instance, and THAT is how google makes its billions.

How does one do that? One way to do this is using visual storytelling to create compelling content that can help you stay ahead of the competition.

For a SaaS company, that is terrifying news because creating consistently useful content is not easy. Each step in the marketing funnel poses a unique challenge.

It is also true, however, that videos are a reliable and fun way to attract attention, engage with the prospects, and build meaningful relationships with customers.

Done right, videos provide the best solution to:

Drive awareness about your organization and product/service using Product marketing videos and bring in a bunch of leads, often organically.
Engage with potential buyers one-to-one and convince them how your product or service can bring relief to them using Explainer videos.
Get them to sign up after the demonstration using Product demo videos.
Help them after they sign up with Onboarding and How-to videos.
Retain them by continuing to provide value using useful content.

To summarize, use of videos for marketing campaigns can:

Increase traffic to your website.
Improve SEO ranking.
Decrease call-center costs.
Increase brand awareness.
Increase engagement with your customers.
Improve sales and promote customer loyalty.
Improve Return-on-investment (ROI).

Let’s throw in some statistics and a clearer picture starts to emerge:

You are more likely to retain 95% of the information when you watch online, but not so much if you read it.
According to Siteefy, watching videos accounts for a third of all internet activity.
Forbes says that about 39% call a vendor after watching the video.

How is ROI measured and why should companies care about it?

In simple words, ROI means checking if it’s worth your while to do something with your time, money and resources, collectively known as investment

ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100

All good up to this point, but it starts to get a little more complex as you go further. Mind you, regardless of the outcome of the above equation, you will be taking just one action — Looking for ways to improve your ROI.

“It’s all about making the denominator in the above equation smaller”

The ROI, however, is more than just a mere equation. Measuring ROI is complex because an actual sales attribution is difficult to pinpoint. But we can broadly classify it into two categories:

Sr. no.	Methodology	Consideration
1	First or Last-touch	A sale-related activity that occurs at the beginning or end
2	Multi-touch	Multiple touch points and people

Further, the following Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are taken into consideration to measure ROI in the digital marketing context:

Sr. no.	KPI	What it measures
1	Cost Per Lead	Money spent to get a lead
2	Cost Per Acquisition (CAC)	Money spent to acquire a customer
3	Customer Lifetime Value	The value your customers can provide
4	Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)	Money made with ad Vs. Ad cost
5	Unique Monthly Visitors	Number of people visiting your website

What metrics should SaaS companies care about to improve ROI?

It all depends on your definition of ROI to decide what metrics you want to monitor.

The metrics from 1 to 4 are specifically related to video production, and you might want to pay special attention to them. That’s because one of the ways to improve ROI is to keep the production costs down. So getting a good understanding of the medium better can help you to make informed decisions.
The metrics from 5 to 9 tell you about what to pay attention to when you run your marketing campaigns, and they may vary depending on the needs of your campaign. There are more, but for this discussion, we limit ourselves to just four important ones.

1. Know your medium

Metric: Familiarity with the medium

Why track: Having a thorough understanding of video content production will help you make more informed decisions.

How to improve metric: If you’re new to the medium, you might find our excellent resources on the subject useful:

Sr. no.	Resource
1	How much does a User Onboarding video cost?
2	How much does a B2B SaaS Explainer video cost?
3	The ultimate list of video growth hacks
4	How to use the right videos for each stage of your marketing funnel and why?
5	What's right for my SaaS business — In-House Video Production, Freelancers, or a Video Production Agency?
6	Complete list of Content Beta guides

2. Know your target audience

Metric: Buyer persona

Why track: Don’t waste your resources on the wrong audience. To do that, you need to identify one or more buyer personas who, essentially, represent a group of people you are trying to reach.

How to improve metric: Your marketing or sales team can assist you in developing an effective buyer persona, since they interact with customers and prospects regularly.

3. Know where your audience hangs out

Metric: Distribution channel

Why track: Each platform offers its own benefits and disadvantages. So, it’s important to use the right advertising platform.

How to improve metric: YouTube rules the roost, so it makes sense to make it a priority. But there are other platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram, that are encouraging the use of video to attract viewers. Here’s some statistics to help you choose the right platform:

Sr. no.	Platform	Views	User age profile
1	YouTube	1 billion hours of video watched every day	Average age is mid-20s
2	Facebook	More than 4 billion video views per day	Predominantly 18-44
3	Instagram	Four types of videos: Video posts, Stories, Live streaming, and IGTV	62% are under 35
4	Twitter	2 billion video views every day, which is 67% YoY growth	76% are under 50
5	LinkedIn	Videos earn 3 times the engagement of text posts	Dominated by 21-45

4. Know your video types

Metric: Video genre

Why track: Investing in the right type of video can save money, time, and resources and help you reach out to the intended audience with the right message.

How to improve metric: Consult the table below to understand what type of content you need to create to meet your purpose.

To see the video examples created for some top SaaS companies in the world, click here

Sr. no.	Video Type	When to use
1	Product Marketing	To showcase your SaaS solution in action
2	How-to/Explainer	To provide useful information to users
3	Infographics	To show a large amount of information in a fun way
4	Doc-to-video	To repurpose brochures and documents
5	FAQ	To save your users the trouble of calling you.
6	Case Studies	To get satisfied customers to vouch for your product
7	Product Demo	To demonstrate products to potential customers
8	Social	To connect emotionally with your audience
9	Webinars	To invite experts in your field to share their thoughts
10	Onboarding	To help users to adopt to your product or service
11	Landing Page	To compel visitors to take quick action
12	Customer Support	To make your sales marketing colleagues easier
13	Company-related	To tell your visitors more about your organization.

5. Know your viewership

Metric: View count

Why track: Measuring your videos’ performance is more than just counting views. Nevertheless, the number of views can tell you whether you did something right, such as your production values or promotional efforts.

“What’s more important than just the view count, however, is whether your video content was successful in meeting the core objective of your campaign.”

For example, if your idea was to get people to sign up for a demo trial. Instead of that, if your video was widely watched and shared but did not have many signups, it would still be considered unsuccessful.

Keep in mind that different platforms have different parameters to decide what constitutes a ‘legitimate view’.

For example, on Facebook it is someone watching a video for 3 seconds while Twitter and LinkedIn consider 3 seconds of viewing with 50% of the video visible on the screen as a proper view. As you can see, the metric is open to interpretations and can often be misleading.

How to improve metric: If your sole aim is to get people to view and share, a slickly-produced entertaining video hosted on the right platform should do the trick. The most watched video on YouTube is the “Baby Shark Dance” with nearly 9.6 billion views since it was uploaded in 2016.

6. Know the effectiveness of your CTA

Metric: Click Through Rate (CTR)

Why track: To know the impact of your video on your audience that prompted them to click on the CTA link or button.

How to improve metric: Apart from the quality of the actual video content, factors like the placement of the CTA button or even the color scheme of your UI elements can make a difference. A/B testing is a reliable way to try two slightly different settings to see what performs better. SEO keyword research and video optimization techniques are also helpful.

7. Know if you are commanding their full attention

Metric: View Through Rate (VTR)

Why track: This metric is more dependable than ‘view count’ and tells you the percentage of people who actually bother to watch the complete video.

How to improve metric: Find out what is causing the viewers to watch certain sections and skip others as it will have a significant impact on conversion rates if they skip the CTA section.

Another metric to watch out for is the load time. People are busy and can’t be expected to twiddle their thumbs whilst your video takes its own sweet time to load. Changing the service provider is an option you might actively consider if the analytics tell you so.

8. Know if your pitch works

Metric: Conversion Rate

Why track: To get a reality check. To know how successful you have been in convincing viewers to do your bidding—be it getting them to sign up or opt for a subscription.

How to improve metric: You might consider changing how and where you present the CTA to viewers. You can use UTM tracking, which involves adding a UTM code to the end of a URL, to track the performance of your marketing campaigns, content, and traffic sources for your website.

9. Know if your content is popular

Metric: Social Media Engagement

Why track: It may or may not play a direct role in driving your revenue, but it will tell you about the quality of your video content. So, monitor your likes, reactions, and shares. Don’t ignore comments because oftentimes, a user comment could be a lot more valuable than the data you gathered via paid market research.

How to improve metric: The best way to make your video shareable is by making it attractive, relevant, and useful. Most people cannot resist sharing good content!

Final words

The ad platforms and distribution channels are primarily meant for getting people to watch your videos, and they only provide high-level data insights at best.

To get an accurate picture that allows you to take corrective measures, however, you need to use CRMs and marketing automation tools to understand the significance of the data, such as the source of the data and significance of user actions.

That’s why, before we wrap up this discussion, we present you with:

A List of Video analytical tools

Sr. no.	Company	Features
1	Wistia	Viewer-based tracking, Video heatmaps, Engagement graphs, Google Analytics integration, Viewer history tracking
2	Vidalytics	Mobile auto play, Exit thumbnails, In video CTAs, CRM & email tagging, Zapier integration
3	Viralstat	Track likes, dislikes, comments, receive notifications of daily statistics, Find trending videos
4	Vidooly	Figure out your audience's digital journey, viewing behavior, devices, and demographics
5	Vimeo	Stats dashboard, Social stats, Engagement & duration graphs, Google Analytics integration

FAQs on SaaS Video ROI

How do you measure the ROI of your SaaS videos?

The general workflow looks something like this: Be clear in your mind what problem your SaaS video is addressing. Define the metrics on which you are going to measure success. Check whether your video is successful in doing it. If not, tweak and improve. If successful, find reasons why it is successful and if you can use it elsewhere to replicate its success.

Why should we use the right type of videos to improve ROI?

A SaaS video comes in various flavors, so it is important to use the right type to meet a specific goal. Example, Social videos to connect with the audience, FAQ videos to reduce customer tickets, product demos to showcase your products to new customers, customer testimonials to improve conversion rates, and so on.

What ROI factors can SaaS videos help with?

SaaS videos can help you bring more visitors to your website, improve site ranking, improve brand awareness, help connect and engage better with customers, create a buzz around your product launches, and get customers to spend more on your website.

Should you consider ‘view count’ a reliable indicator of measuring your video’s performance?

It depends. If your intention is to get people to watch your videos, then the answer is yes. If it is to increase sales, mere view count may not mean much to you. But the consolation you can draw is that your video is made well enough to attract a random surfer!

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