The Rise of Video Analytics

According to eMarketer, online video advertisements grew 89% from 2006 to 2007, and are projected to grow 68% from 2007 to 2008 to $1.3 billion dollars. By 2010, online video advertising is expected to reach almost $3 billion. And by 2011, almost 90% of the U.S. internet population will have consumed online video.

What is behind the rise of online video?

Clearly, the acquisition of YouTube by Google broadened the reach of online video and encouraged active participation by users. The availability of news, movies and TV shows online is also driving the growth of online video. NBC expects 2,200 hours of Olympic events to be online and available for viewing. Also, the social engagement of easily sharing videos with others is driving growth.

Making video analytics actionable

Despite this significant growth in the adoption of online video, effectively measuring and analyzing the usage of online video is still in its infancy. Many issues must be overcome including technical challenges to the many different video player formats currently being used, uncertainly about the most useful KPI’s, and the overall lack of talented analytics resources that have experience with video analytics.

In order to start taking action on video analytics it is helpful to first outline a high-level grouping of the types of metrics (or video analytics KPI’s) that I have found to be of interest when it comes to measuring video analytics.

• Basic Metrics: This includes views, visits, unique viewers, duration of views, and the technical profiles of the visitors, etc.
• Engagement: Which videos have the highest visitor engagement, where do visitors abandon the video, and which video segments capture their attention and cause them to rewind, etc. Applying this type of data to the specific video asset in question is often a key requirement.
• Distribution: Distribution helps to understand where video’s are consumed, URL’s they are being viewed at, the type of referral source, (e.g. email, RSS, etc) and geography of the viewers consuming content.

The next step in the process is to select an appropriate set of technology to collect and analyze video analytics data. Several tools provide varying degrees of video measurement. Traditional web analytics vendors like Omniture and WebTrends both released video analytics functionality this year. Another option is to work with firms that specialize in video analytics, such as Visible Measures. In each case, you will have the capability to track the basic metrics, but in the case of the more specialized firms you will have access to additional capabilities around tracking distribution, engagement and the performance of individual video assets within the context of the video itself. As always, when considering this type of investment, it is important to consider the level of effort required for the implementation, which is often dependant on the number and type of video players your organization uses. Additionally, I encourage you to consider the level of data integration needed with your other marketing analytics data so you can effectively evaluate the total investment necessary to meet your business requirements.