The group discussed how tracking and measurement can be used to gauge the effectiveness of your online video and the tastes of your customers, as well as answer important business questions.

Key takeaways:

The technology used to create video determines how you track it. These include five primary video formats:
o Brightcove-type, robust players with built-in APIs
o Self-created players that use Flash/FLEX/Breeze as a compiled file (eg. .swf)
o Mobile video
o Flash/Silverlight content, which requires the installation of a web browser plug-in
o Content on third-party sites, tracked by a direct-image call

Brightcove’s best practices for determining video track (Engagement + Reach). This can then be paired with Webtrends’ web site conversions for the best of both worlds.

Important video metrics include:
o Categories your visitors like most. This insight can be used to reduce the amount of development time you put into videos which your visitors are not interested in.
o The attention span of your audience. If viewers aren’t watching videos to the end, your videos may be too long and you need to consider reducing the time length of your videos
o Ads in the video (known as pre-roll and post-roll ads).

Tips:
• Add the total run time of the video in the title to more easily determine percentage of completion.
• Expose video metadata to the web page so web crawlers and spiders can see it.
• Create a segment called Unique Video visitors to report on the subset of video visitors and their behaviors.
• Direct image calls can be made to track video ads and other content on third-party sites.
• Mix geography with video tracking to correlate how visitors are consuming video content (percentage of completion, video shares and video star ratings) with their location.
Key features of Webtrends and Brightcove video tracking:
• The DCSMultitrack function in the WebTrends JavaScript tag lets you combine data about your BC videos/players with any other data that is captured about the page/visitor, such as geographic location or referrer.
• Syndicated players are tracked (though no visitor data will be captured) by the multitrack function when it makes direct calls to the tracking gif.
• The track event function can pass any number of key/value pairs, thus each event can pass additional data without the need for completely recoding the swf.
• The percentage of the video that has been viewed can be tracked using DCSext.bc_prog variable.

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