Estimated read time: 3 min (excluding video… but you gotta watch the video)

What’s in it for you: get some insight into how to more effectively track a Youtube video’s impact on your site.

Here’s one of my favorite videos right now.  Take a look. Enjoy. Then we’ll think about how we can gauge it’s ‘success.’

Love it. Toyota well done.

After my initial viewing, I could not stop raving about how brilliant this video was, etc.  Surely the Honda marketing team dropped the f* bomb after seeing this.  It’s got over 3 million views on Youtube so this has got to be driving crazy traffic and engagement to the Toyota site… right?  Lets take a look.

Below is a snapshot of Google Insight to see trends of “swagger wagon” and “toyota sienna”.  You can clearly see “swagger wagon” jump, but not so much “toyota sienna”.

Below is a snapshot of traffic to www.toyota.com via Alexa.com.

Doesn’t seem like much increase in visits according to Alexa.

I think it’s critical if a company does any type of big media advertisement, whether tv, radio, print, that they are prepared on their web analytics end to monitor any spikes it may cause within the 24-48 hrs of the ad launch.

So let’s get down to some things they should be doing to measure their success.  Perhaps they are… but lets go through it anyway.  Here’s what I would do:

1) Create a unique url for this video that is easy to remember. Something like www.toyota.com/swagger.  So you know that people typing in this url are traffic unique to the audience who have watched this particular video.

2) Let’s create some sort of incentive to go to that page.  Maybe a chance to win a Sienna SE?  With all the issues that Toyota has been having lately, surely an awesome giveaway like this will only be good for the brand?  So maybe a free Sienna is a bit much… but maybe not if they can determine the impact of traffic this video is having.

3) Tracking. You want to see it in your analytics tool.  How? So for Google Analytics, you can set a meta-refresh tag and set the appropriate campaign variables.  For Omniture, just hardcode in s.campaign with “swagger” or whatever you want to call it.

Hmmm.. #1.  The video does not dive into any features of the Sienna and it barely shows much of the van.  Though this video tugs at the emotions, in the end, it’s the features, reliability, etc that will get me to make that end conversion of purchasing one.  Wouldn’t it be great to know this video generated X number of users to at least ‘build & customize’ their Sienna at www.toyota.com?  If Toyota has data on for every user that finishes ‘building’ their van online, X percent end up buying online or at a dealership, you can attribute an approximate $ value to the traffic being generated from this video.  Now we’re talking!

Hmmm.. #2. There are many reports showing that social media is the fastest growing NEW user acquisition channel.  How great would it be for Toyota to measure and tag all the visitors coming from this video as ‘new’ to get a gauge of the number of new potential customers?  You can set a custom conversion variable to indicate a user as a new customer and see the successes of them starting and finishing the ‘build & customize’ a new Sienna process.  Talk about getting the attention of the senior level execs.  You show data on how much your marketing efforts are leading to new customer acquisitions and you and your boss will be heroes!

So in conclusion:

1) I heart this video and now will seriously consider at least test driving the Sienna for my next van purchase even though my wife and I love our Honda Odysseys.

2) I hope I’ve shown some simple ways to track the impact of something like this ‘viral’ video or offline campaigns

What do you think?

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