How to Measure KPIs of VR Marketing Campaigns

Fortunately, VR is becoming mainstream along with its various implementations and the possibility to make VR glasses literally out of paper. While downloading a car is still an unrealistic concept, you do have the ability to download VR glasses. That’s why marketing and analytics companies already offer a number of very potent analytical solutions for VR implementations and marketing campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at some of them. CognitiveVR enables to visualize and review VR sessions, with the option of exploring them post factum. It supports a variety of VR products, from mainstream Oculus to less famous Fove. It basically records VR sessions and lets you review them later on. For example, if you have a virtual room, you could find the most popular route around it, etc. InstaVR offers a different set of analytical capabilities, with a focus on viewers’ heatmaps. This might be a good starting point as heat maps should give you a plenty of information to digest. There’s also Ghostline, which even offers biometrical insights, like a viewer’s height. It can also be used to learn more about a viewer’s environment (room-scale or standing VR setup). RetinadVR is also a pretty robust VR analytical platform that can provide recommendations about possible engagement improvements that you could implement within your VR products. 

Virtualitics differentiates from the rest by advertising itself as a data-first analytical platform for VR with an emphasis on machine learning, natural language processing, and other fancy advanced analytical techniques. Of course, many of these tools might not work for you. Some of them might be difficult to integrate. Others might be too simple for your requirements. A lot of the functionality might end up being useless. Pricing is also something that you should consider. The aggregate data that these tools collect will help you understand the performance metrics of your VR products. But in many cases, they won’t help you to create a meaningful connection between VR and your bottom line. The biggest problem with VR is the fact that it’s almost a physical experience. You can’t exactly put a price tag next to that. It’s not a video, which is practically synonymous to a banner ad. That’s why there is a pseudo-scientific definition of ROI for VR that looks like this: 

The biggest problem with it? It can’t be calculated, as some of the parameters within it, like ‘emotions’, can’t be quantified. But it gives you the idea of what actually should be included within a proper VR analytical suite. This, in turn, helps you realize that with the current level of technology it’s impossible to be super accurate with your VR performance indicators and ROI. That’s why it’s important to get to the basic level of VR analytics. Start identifying metrics that you care about the most and eventually create a holistic approach as soon as you understand what and how can be implemented. But what are some of the KPIs that you can start with? And how should you track or implement them? Let’s take a closer look at some of the easier and simpler KPIs for VR products that you can implement with little to no technical effort. 

Your VR implementations have to be strategic. Don’t waste precious resources and time to build up a portfolio of VR experiences for each of your products, product lines or services. Let’s take a look at a very simple example. You have an online store that sells furniture. You have 2 couches that are very similar: they’re in the same price category, have similar fabric patterns, and so on. This is a great opportunity to make a shortcut if you want to really know that VR works for your products. Have a VR experience created for one of the products and don’t touch the other one assuming that both products are also fairly represented. For example, if one of them is above the fold and the other one is not, this may affect the final result. After a couple of weeks, you should start seeing the difference if VR really affected purchasing volumes. In this case, your KPI for VR videos would be actual conversions and purchases. The more A/B tests like this you are able to cram into your product line, the higher the accuracy of your assumptions will be. 

VR is a far more complex medium than anything traditional marketers are utilizing today. The range of senses that virtual reality affects is wide, which makes viewers remember such experiences for quite a long time. This alone is the key advantage that VR offers when compared to video or any other type of content marketing. Emotions are priceless from the personal and business point of view. That’s why some brands that exploit emotional connections have successfully raised their conversion rates by 40% - 70%.

And brands do invest in VR. For example, Magic Leap, a mixed reality startup, recently received $800 mln. from various investors, including Alibaba, putting its valuation at $4.5 billion. The biggest problem with VR is that it’s not completely integrated into the sales process. There is no grocery store in VR where you can go and make a purchase. A lot of apps in VR will ask you to go offline to make the purchase or simply don’t even try to go that far. In a landscape like this, it’s important to anchor your business expectations from VR and remember that sometimes it’s pretty hard to place a price tag on experiences. So for your specific marketing strategy, there might be no actual KPI to keep track of apart from the buzz generated online, and customer interactions that these VR products lead up to (on social media, etc.). That’s why to gain a better understanding of VR as a marketing tool, you either have to use the standard set of KPIs that are adaptable from other marketing channels or use one of the VR analytical solutions that have been popping up for a couple of years now, fueled by the growing interest in VR as a branding and product discovery tool. In any case, we hope that you’ll be able to find a common ground between your desire to implement VR and the ability to accurately measure its business impact.