Lights, camera, action…video measurement
telleston | February 27, 2011Many of us use video on our sites these days for different communication reasons. And those videos generally take a fair amount of effort (and cost) to put together. Understanding video engagement is therefore quite important to know which videos are most engaging, which ones lead to most conversions and so on.
To date, we have generally used YouTube for our videos. But the problem is that we only get the basic information from YouTube, we aren’t able to see more insightful information.
There’s a number of ways of integrate video measurement data into SiteCatalyst, either by embedding the code into your own video player and then hosting the video on your site, or by using a third party source.
Personally I believe the third party source is better for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the video is streamed from their content delivery network. You also don’t need to worry about your flash skills…mine are atrocious.
Brightcove
I was pleasantly surprised at how it easy it was to use Brightcove for video serving and integrating into Omniture. Not only that, but they are customer-focused. Their reps emailed and called me shortly after signing up for a trial, send me some useful information and worked with me to get it all working. They even solved a minor problem I had (all pre-purchase stuff).
While Brightcove has an excellent analytics section on videos available to you, the benefits of integrating the data with your existing SiteCatalyst data are obvious – you can see views, paths, conversions and so forth, and you can classify the videos just like you can for your campaigns or products.
Integrate and measure
There are only really 10 steps involved:
From your Omniture Reporting Suite admin, download the AppMeasurementExtension.swf file.- Edit your report suite settings to enable video measurement (basically tick the boxes).
- Create a config file.
- Host the AppMeasurementExtension.swf file and the config file on your server.
- Update your crossdomain.xml file to allow brightcove.com.
- Upload your video to Brightcove.
- Add a setting for your AppMeasurementExtension to be called.
- Attach the video to a player and generate the website code.
- Add the code to your website.
- Play the video through your site and you’re done.
How easy could that be. No flash programming. No fuss.
What you get are a whole suite of extra reports all dedicated to your videos.
We set ours to report every 10 seconds to see if it was still being viewed. The results are shown above for our test data. As you can see, there is a drop off of people abandoning the video as it plays. But, there looks to be an interesting segment between 35 and 55 seconds that some people are viewing more than once.
The other nice thing is that you can get all of your other conversion variables in the video reports. Here’ we’re showing some of the basic video measure, but also how many pages were viewed by someone who watched videos as well as the number products (courses) viewed.
In the above report, I’ve broken down the video report by products (courses) to see the actual courses that were viewed by people who also viewed the video.
So, to the nitty gritty
There’s only really one bit of code that you need to create…the config file, which is a simple XML file, located somewhere on your servers. This file looks like:
<config>
<account>your-rsid</account>
<debugtracking>true</debugtracking>
<visitornamespace>your-namespace</visitornamespace>
<dc>tracking-server-number</dc>
<pagename>Brightcove Test</pagename>
<media>
<autotrack>true</autotrack>
<trackwhileplaying>true</trackwhileplaying>
<trackseconds>10</trackseconds>
</media>
</config>
When you’ve uploaded your video to Brightcove, you edit the player to include a custom plugin – which is the AppMeasurementExtension.swf.
The plugin needs to know where the App Extension and config file is. Ours is:
http://www.murdoch.edu.au/_flash/videos/AppMeasurementExtension.swf
?s.configURL=www.murdoch.edu.au/_document/xml_data/config.xml
Note that the above is all on one line, not two.
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Couldn’t be much easier to integrate video measurement from Brightcove into Omniture SiteCatalyst!
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thanks for this post. One questions though. How do you pass through the video names from Brightcove? When i try this is just passes through the video id.
Hi Amardeep, thanks for pointing that out.
Yes, Brightcove passes in the MovieID, which you can then use SAINT classifications to provide a more useful name. It’s also useful to do this if you have multiple videos in different categories of content, as you can then provide a hierarchy for each video. For example, suppose you have a series of Motor Sports videos, then you can classify them each with a specific name, but roll them up to Motor Sports, likewise for other categories of videos.
To classify them, set up classifications in the Admin, under Video Management > Video Classifications. When you’ve done that, go to the Conversion > Conversion Hierarchies and set up the hierarchy for Videos. Then go into SAINT and add the relevant information.
Hope that helps.
While this seems simple to implement, it’s really causing me frustration.
Here is my xml: http://reesenews.org/config.xml
Here is my crossdomain: http://reesenews.org/crossdomain.xml
And, I’ve got my URL in the Brightcove Plug-In panel: http://reesenews.org/AppMeasurementExtension.swf?s.configURL=reesenews.org/config.xml
As well as Javascript checked off.
Yesterday, I enabled all my Site Catalyst 15 tracking tools with Client Services at Adobe to add Video tracking. Still not seeing the output.
Where are you getting your from? I’ve looked in the documentation and I think mine is 112, but then I see “dc1″ or “dc2″ in other docs, and I can’t be sure.
Any ideas?
Hmmm, interesting Tony. If you’re running SCv15, then you’ll need to have additional eVars and events in your config.xml. The above example was for SCv14. SCv15 requires that you dedicate 3 eVars, at least 4 custom events, 1 s.prop (and a partridge in a pair tree).
The eVars are for: Video Name, Segments, Content Type.
The events are for: Video Time, Video Views, Video Completes and Video Segment Views
The s.prop is for: Video Name.
You’ll also need to include those in your config.xml file, an example of which is:
myrsid
true
corp1
corp1.d1.sc.omtrdc.net
true
25,50,75,100
events,eVar1,eVar2,eVar3
event1,event2,event3,event4,event5,event6,event7
true
true
eVar2,prop2
eVar3
eVar1
event3
event1
event2
event4
event5
event6
event7
Now, I’ve not yet used the SCv15 Video – it’s brand new and I still need to migrate over some videos, but I think if you change your config.xml file, adding in the extra eVars etc, it should work.
I’ll have a crack at it too and let you know how I get on.
Hope this helps.
Tim
Hey Tim,
I’ve got some questions around SAINT and classifications. In Site Catalyst 15, the path is different. I cannot access “Video Management” but can access “Video Reporting.”
I went under Video Reporting, navigated to Conversion – Conversion Classifications, then added Videos. Now I see “Videos” in the list of Conversion Classifications.
I can then go into Conversion – Classification Hierarchies and see “Video” which I’d set up.
Your instructions might apply to 14 and not 15. Have you set out on the path to creating the SAINT set up? I’ve seen some other instructions online, but nothing related to video.
Hope you got my last email.
Tony Zeoli
Thank you Tim, this is the most concise description of this procedure I have found on the web. I have one question though – does including pre-roll to a video player affect siteCatalyst measurements?
e.g. the pre-roll begins on clicking the play button on the player.
Previously in the context data mapping, was set to fire an event to indicate the video had been played (but not how much, we include milestones for that).
Do you know does including a pre-roll then to the player mess up our video view stats or does the plugin only come into effect when the pre-roll is finished?
thank you,
Mike
Hi Mike, thanks for comment. The answer is, it depends, unfortunately. It depends on how you’ve set up your pre-roll. Typically, you’d set the pre-roll to play, then play the video. So your measurement will include pre-roll time if you’re tracking through milestones.
Another approach you might want to try is to track by seconds (e.g. 30) instead of milestones, and vary the segment viewed by using the s.Media.monitor function. For example, if you know the length of the pre-roll, s.Media.monitor “watches things” every second, so you could pass “pre-roll” on start, then “video start” on start of the real thing. In your Video Details report, it would show the success events (time played and video views) against the segment name (eVar). You need to explicitly set the eVars and events using that method though.
An example of changing the segment eVar is below – this fires off every 30 seconds as that’s whats in the s_code:
// Insert the media segments when SECONDS is used
s.Media.monitor = function (s,media){
s.trackVars = “events,eVar31,eVar51,eVar52,prop31″;
s.trackEvents = “event9,event55,event57″;
if ((media.event == “SECONDS”) ) {
s.eVar51 = (media.timePlayed/60) + ” min”;
s.events = “event57″;
sendRequest();
}
function sendRequest(){
s.Media.track(media.name);
}
}
Of course, another method might be to treat them as separate videos, and pass a play, stop, play when the video reaches a specific point in time (i.e. the end of the pre-roll) – assuming of course you know the length of the pre-roll.