Video Reporting 101 [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Author’s Note: This post was writ­ten by Omni­ture Consulting’s video guru’s!

Over the past 12–18 months, video has quickly become one of the fastest grow­ing and effec­tive forms of rich media on the inter­net.  And just like all other online mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, it should be mon­i­tored and opti­mized to max­i­mize your return on invest­ment.  In this post, we’ll pro­vide insight not only into the impor­tance of online videos but also how Omni­ture can help you extract max­i­mum ROI.

Why Online Video Report­ing?
Why is online video so impor­tant to your online busi­ness?  For con­tent providers, such as media com­pa­nies, video pro­vides a lucra­tive mon­e­ti­za­tion stream as well as a rich engag­ing tool for vis­i­tors.   Pre-roll adver­tise­ments, for exam­ple, com­mand higher CPM’s than their sta­tic con­tent coun­ter­parts.   Know­ing how much video is con­sumed, what the opti­mum video length for your audi­ence is, and which parts of your video are most watched allow you to opti­mize your ad sell space.

Retail­ers use video for prod­uct review or demon­stra­tion pur­poses, with the hope that cus­tomers who view videos will become more likely to pur­chase a prod­uct or ser­vice.  Ser­vice providers can use video to reduce sup­port costs by pro­vid­ing an infor­ma­tive, highly engag­ing self ser­vice sup­port tool.  The same can be said for any num­ber of online busi­nesses with goals includ­ing lead gen­er­a­tion, micro-conversions, and brand aware­ness. Know­ing which of your videos lead to the most online con­ver­sions can allow you to effec­tively allo­cate money and resources cre­at­ing them.

Clearly video can be an impor­tant part of your online strat­egy, and Omni­ture can help you make the most of it. Though not an exhaus­tive list, here are a few crit­i­cal ques­tions that Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst can help you answer:

Most Pop­u­lar Videos/Video Cat­e­gories
What are my most pop­u­lar videos or cat­e­gories?  The report below tells you at a glance which videos are your most pop­u­lar for the spec­i­fied time period.  You can also see that aver­age view time and how many users watch 70–100% of your video (the report­ing per­cent­age dis­played can eas­ily be con­fig­ured).  If you notice that a video is very pop­u­lar but has a poor com­ple­tion rate, then that video may need to be short­ened or the video title may not match your user’s expec­ta­tion what the video should be.

In addi­tion to video views, other met­rics like video vis­its tell you how many over­all vis­its to the site included at least one video view. And like most other Site Cat­a­lyst Vari­ables, you can clas­sify on the video title so that you can report these met­rics by rel­e­vant cat­e­gories like topic, video cre­ator, pub­lish date etc.

Opti­mal Video Length
Are my videos the opti­mal length for my audi­ence?  Con­tin­u­ing the exam­ple above, let’s say that you notice a pop­u­lar video has a par­tic­u­larly low com­ple­tion rate.  To deter­mine why, you could pull a video seg­ments viewed report to see where the drop off occurs.  In the report below, it looks like more than half of the audi­ence drops off within first 30 sec­onds of the video.  Past the 30 sec­ond mark the remain­ing audi­ence tends to stay to the end. What is it about the first 30 sec­onds of our video that could be con­tribut­ing to this drop off? Are all the points of inter­est in the first 30 sec­onds of the video?  Per­haps there’s a tech­ni­cal issue that makes the video jerky or load slowly.  Is there a crit­i­cal mid-roll com­mer­cial that con­tributes to aban­don­ment?  These are all ques­tions that we can inves­ti­gate fur­ther for our key videos.

Video Con­tri­bu­tion
Do my videos con­tribute in a pos­i­tive way to my site suc­cess?  The report below shows which videos were viewed in the same visit as a pur­chase.  Site Cat­a­lyst allows you to attribute rev­enue any­where from the last video viewed or up to the last 10 videos viewed before the purchase.

Viral Video Track­ing
If I have videos that I put out on pop­u­lar video shar­ing sites such as YouTube, Vid­dler, and Yahoo! Video, can I know how widely they are being viewed in an easy fash­ion?   Site­Cat­a­lyst can help here as well.  Omni­ture has just announced an exclu­sive new fea­ture that is now avail­able as a beta to the gen­eral Omni­ture cus­tomer base.  This new tool that allows you to mon­i­tor your videos across all the pop­u­lar video shar­ing sites and, in one report, see the total num­ber of views. You can also cre­ate cus­tom video lists that you want to track.  If you are inter­ested in join­ing this Beta pro­gram, please con­tact your Omni­ture Account Man­ager or Con­sul­tant for more details.

Get­ting Started
So how do you get started?  The answer to this depends on your media player and how cus­tom you need your imple­men­ta­tion to be.  Omni­ture code can be used to track any Quick­time, Win­dows Media, or Real Player videos.  Plus Site­Cat­a­lyst can be used to track flash based video play­ers, includ­ing any third-party ven­dors (such as Bright­Cove and Maven) that allow their cus­tomers to add cus­tom code their players.

To get started, log into Site Cat­a­lyst then go to Sup­port­ing Docs» Man­u­als.  The first entry under the Imple­men­ta­tion Guide col­umn is the Media Track­ing and Action Source man­ual.  This is a man­ual that will give you direc­tion on track­ing videos, using both JavaScript and Flash, in addi­tion to track­ing flash appli­ca­tions in gen­eral.   You can also search the knowl­edge base for any white papers that may be help­ful.  See the Media Track­ing man­ual for more details on what kind of effort would be involved for your par­tic­u­lar player.

How cus­tom does your video imple­men­ta­tion need to be?   If you only need to see video data within the video reports of Site­Cat­a­lyst, then a basic imple­men­ta­tion should be enough for you.  How­ever, if you want to see more gran­u­lar video data or that data in rela­tion to your other cus­tom eVars, props, and events, then a lit­tle more cus­tomiza­tion should be done.  You can learn more from the imple­men­ta­tion guide.

Finally, how much will this cost?  Video track­ing is based on the num­ber of server calls being sent to Omni­ture.  There is no cost to enable the video reports in your report suite or to obtain the code from your Account Man­ager or Con­sul­tant.  The only incre­men­tal cost is the addi­tional num­ber of server calls sent dur­ing video play.  As part of the out-of-the-box track­ing option, a server call is sent at video begin and end (2 server calls per com­plete video watched).  To get more gran­u­lar view­ing infor­ma­tion, we rec­om­mend that you send update server calls through­out video play.  You can send as few or as many as you like.  The more fre­quent the updates, the more detailed that data and vice versa.  Omni­ture code allows you to send updates at cus­tom per­cent­age com­plete mile­stones (such as 25%, 50%, or 75%) or for num­ber of sec­onds watched (every 30 sec­onds, for exam­ple).  So the num­ber of server calls sent in per video is com­pletely depen­dent on the cost ben­e­fit of addi­tional server calls per video view.  Other fac­tors such as video length, video con­tent, and your audi­ence will help deter­mine the right num­ber of server calls per video for your site.

As always, you can engage with an Omni­ture Con­sul­tant for more advanced help and to dis­cuss options related to pros/cons of more gran­u­lar video tracking.

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Is there some­thing on your web­site that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best prac­tices you want to share?  If so, please leave a com­ment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@​omniture.​com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so every­one can learn! (Don’t worry — I won’t use your name or com­pany name!).  If you are on Twit­ter, you can fol­low me at http://​twit​ter​.com/​O​m​n​i​_​man.

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