Last updated on June 14th, 2024
Today on VidPow TubeTalk, Jeremy Vest and his special guest, Dane Golden of VidAction.tv, talk about video marketing and tracking links attribution and conversion on YouTube. Also we’d like to give a special thanks to VidSummit and TubeBuddy for being a proud sponsor of the TubeTalk Podcast.
Today we’re talking about why you need link tracking, also known as attribution, of your videos in your sales and marketing funnel.
In previous podcasts we’ve talked about how linking off YouTube can potentially hurt your channel in a significant way. So you need to do so judiciously. But of course eventually if someone is going to buy something they have to leave YouTube somehow. So you want to give viewers the chance to visit your website organically.
But if you add a link in the description, should you use the same link for every video? What if you want to track which video got more cliks?
In marketing, attribution is the process of identifying a set of user actions (“events” or “touchpoints”) that contribute in some manner to a desired outcome, and then assigning a value to each of these events. Here’s how you use link tracking for email in Pardot.
Sadly, many YouTube marketing channels don’t use attribution at all – even some marketing automation companies aren’t doing this on YouTube. Why? In the first place, it’s hard to automate. You have to do it manually and have a manual database of what you’re linking to. In the second place, brands have been conditioned by paid ads on YouTube to believe that nobody clicks from YouTube. This is not true. People will click if you ask them to, both verbally and in text. Perhaps not as many as you would like, but why waste this opportunity.
Importantly, always use http:// before any URL or https or it won’t link.
To track links, use your normal UTM code naming system, and then put it within a Bitly link so it looks a little cleaner. And it’s often best to just have one call-to-action, not many. Remember to put the link within the first three lines of the description.