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Thinking of integrating video into your web experience?
Have you made that decision and are close to deploying it for your customers? Perhaps your site already has video and a critical decision now needs made as to its effectiveness in meeting your business objectives…
Whatever the reason, chances are your web site either has video or is going to have video on it in the near future. Video usage on the web is increasing rapidly. The technology exists to make video marketing from your web site a real possibility. Now that you have made the time and money commitment, we better understand how it is performing.
Need For Video Tracking
Should we make another video library for our product launch this fall? What is the return it will yield from the cost of production, development, and deployment to the web? Will it increase our lead generation? Will the video boost online sales of that new device it is promoting? Are people even watching these? If so, do they tend to watch the whole video or do we lose them after the first 45 seconds? In short, is it accomplishing our goals, or just causing us more work and bandwidth?
These are the questions business owners should be asking. With the help of video tracking data at their fingertips, the answers can help making decisions about leveraging video much more accurate and effective. Valuable data for quality analysis should accompany the implementation of video into your user’s web experience.
The data gleaned from video tracking can help justify the cost of producing the video. If revenue increases by 20% when a product has video marketing associated with it, it may be cost effective to produce video for the next product release. The data can also illustrate video’s effectiveness in increasing online sales for product so that the product managers can work effectively with the marketing team to spend their budget wisely.
Depending on the video produced, there are several tracking possibilities available today. Most are custom solutions which a content distributor provides when serving up the video. One solution available today comes from Omniture. Their web optimization tools now include a video tracking module for both JavaScript implementations, as well as Adobe’s popular Flash technology implementations. The rest of this article will look at Omniture’s video tracking solution.
Omniture Video Tracking Solution
Omniture’s video tracking is their solution to the ever increasing use of video in the online world. It gathers that essential data the business owners need to have for their decisions, providing key metrics for things like tracking video usage, path viewing from video to video, and customer player usage.
The video tracking module falls under Omniture’s Site Catalyst product. It essentially keeps track of the user interaction with the video and reports back to Omniture’s collection servers. This allows the user to view the metric data via the Site Catalyst user interface. You can look at Omniture’s Site Catalyst product for more details at:
http://www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecatalyst.
A video tracking implementation can be as simple or complex as it needs to be. If you have a simple video implementation on your site then video tracking can be up and running with very little effort. If a more complex and custom video distribution interface is utilized, then some additional work will be needed but Omniture’s product can handle it.
Basic Site Tracking with Omniture
Omniture takes an object-oriented approach to tracking the web usage for a site. (Let’s assume for this article that JavaScript is object oriented) They use an object to store all the functions and properties used to track the data.
In a JavaScript implementation, the object is most often instantiated in the “s” scope of the Document Object Model (DOM) for the web page. The “s” object is defined in the “s_code.js” library which Omniture provides. The site developer then manipulates data properties and utilizes methods of “s” in order to track the data business owners need.
Similarly, Flash applications have an “s” object that is instantiated from an “ActionSource” object that is compiled into the .fla file. The ActionSource.mxp is similar to the “s_code.js” library for Flash’s ActionScript.
Both “s” objects of JavaScript and ActionScript have a “Media” object. The s_code.js library utilizes a Media Module that is added to the library file by the developer. This module must be requested from Omniture as it is NOT included in a default implementation of the s_code.js library. The ActionSource component has the Media Module in it by default. There are a three main settings of this s.Media object to enable video tracking.
s.Media.autoTrack=true;
s.Media.trackVars="prop1,eVar2,events";
s.Media.trackEvents="event12";
The “s.Media. autoTrack” setting will be true for simple implementations and false for the more complex implementations. The differences between the two will be addressed shortly in this article.
The other two settings provide a mechanism for more metrics tracking so that the videos can be attributed to increased online sales, lead generation, or other important business objectives.
The “s.Media.trackVars” setting will send the defined metric variables when the video data is sent with the Omniture collection call.
The “s.Media.trackEvents” setting will send only those events with the Omniture collection call.
The next sections will dive a bit deeper into these settings in order to illustrate the use of the “s.Media” object. Before going further, it should be noted that additional configuration is required with the Administration section of Site Catalyst in order to turn Site Catalyst “on” to accept video data. This configuration is beyond the scope of this article.
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