Understanding competitive performance is critical to developing your online video brand strategy. It enables you to create your campaign goals and benchmarks, as well as helps identify the creative approaches that resonate with your target audiences.
To help you get started tracking peer and competitive performance in online video, we've developed five easy steps using our award-winning online video benchmarking application, Trends. For the purposes of illustration, we'll look at how Snickers' You're Not You When You're Hungry stands up to the competition in online video.
Watch how to track competitive performance in online video in five easy steps.
1. Find your industry.
Once in Trends, you'll want to narrow your search from the nearly 300 available social video campaigns to a tighter subset. Since Snickers is a snack food, filter the listed campaigns to the food industry (one of over thirty in Trends). If you want to compare Snicker's performance against top-performing brand campaigns from other industries, such as Nike or Evian, you can readily do so by marking specific campaigns as 'favorites.'
2. Identify your competitors.
Now that you've selected the food industry for Snickers, you need to identify some competitive campaigns for comparison. After a quick search, you might notice relevant campaigns from other candy bar brands, including Cadbury and Butterfinger. If you want to get a quick idea of overall performance, you can compare the cumulative reach of the campaigns. To see who's been most successful recently, you can compare each campaign's incremental reach.
3. Compare performance.
When you're done reviewing high-level numbers, select the campaigns you want to compare. For this example, you have Snickers: You're Not You When You're Hungry, Butterfinger: Dude Where My Bar, and Cadbury: Eyebrow Dance.
In the graph, you can see that Eyebrow Dance is significantly outperforming the rest of the group, and by clicking "incremental" we see that its performance has plateaued at a few hundred thousand views per week. You're Not You When You're Hungry had nearly 3 million views when it launched compared to 1.2 million for Dude Where's my Bar. Last week, You're Not You When You're Hungry hit 91,000 views compared to Dude Where's my Bar's mere 2,200 views. Eyebrow Dance topped the group with 95,000. You can save the comparison, check it weekly to see how the campaigns progress, and even share it with your colleagues.
4. Compare demographics.
With a professional Trends account, you can compare campaign demographics under the Demographics tab. With this comparison, you'll see that Cadbury's campaign has attracted the most female viewers of the group with 43%. Both the Snickers and Butterfinger campaigns have attract a more male-oriented online video viewing audience.
5. Drill into performance
Now that you've looked at the campaign comparison, drill into You're Not You When You're Hungry's performance by clicking on 'View Details' beneath the campaign name. On the Campaign Details page, you can see that 65% of the views for the campaign have been driven by the brand. Under the Demographics tab, you can see that the campaign has less female viewers than the food industry average.
As you can see, conducting competitive online video research in Trends is easy, valuable, and fun, too. Try these five easy steps with your competitors by signing into your Trends account. Let us know how it goes!
If you have a free account and want more features like demographics, viral vs. seeded breakdowns, and category benchmarks, contact us for a professional account. You'll be able to keep better tabs on the competition.