Hands on with Omniture viral video tools
This week I had the pleasure of getting some hands on time with Omnitures Viral Video Measurement tools. The service integrates directly into sitecatalyst and can be found under the standard video menu, the option is called video sharing. The tool differ’s from the standard offerings in sitecatalyst in the sense that it is actually an interface for integrating reporting on off-site content aka viral video. The component parts of the tool consist of a search interface which will do a meta search across popular video aggregators based on keywords.
Omniture Viral Video Tool
Videos are displayed along with any associated meta data such as total views, author, comments and user ratings. Included on the page is a embedded player to preview any video found with search. You can save a search which adds it to your video sharing homepage which indicates if new videos arrive that match your search terms.
Where this gets interesting is that you can select single or multiple videos and add them to a watch list. You can add as many watch list as you like. Once this is done Omniture will periodically poll the source data from the relevant video aggregator and actually create a report in sitecatalyst which tracks the perfromance in terms of views, comments, average user score etc. Most of the standard dashboard and report controls are present with the exception of alerting, so this data is ready for integration into the rest of your reports.
The solution is simple and effective, an impressive value add to organisations who invest in online video. You don’t need to be using the standard sitecatalyst video reports to take advantage of this service. It points to a potentially exciting direction for the sitecatalyst tool where integrating non-standard analytics solutions to measure what’s happening off site with out dealing with data sources could be a powerful thing. Hopefully Omniture will consider integrating their developer connection twitter hack into a fully fledged integration like this one. Better still open up this reporting framework for off site access to data to the developer connection community and let the world create interesting integrations that are easier for customers to take advantage of.
Nice work and check it out if you get a chance.
Let me get this straight. A tool that will let me comprehensively gauge sentiment across (almost?) any video sharing site, and also tie in reports already associated with my site campaigns and identify revenue correlations? It sounds like this tool could help me identify exactly where to spend my advertising dollars. For example, if I notice spikes on MSN in my video sharing dashboard for a video campaign i can take a look at the sentiment (average ratings, number of ratings, number of comments) and probably decide to allocate more advertising dollars to the sharing site that’s bringing the traffic - thereby maximizing my online advertising dollar.
Imagine the possibilities for video publishers who currently have to depend on one-by-one video sharing sites to track gauge viewer engagement and sentiment. Or even worse, are wasting cycles and time having error prone humans compile the data and report on it manually or with one off scripts. But to tie this data into the rest of SiteCatalyst is indeed a very nice “value add”.
And that monitored search feature sounds delicious… does it really go out and actively hunt down videos that meet your marketing criteria? I’d love a little black box that poked me when something related to my campaign came out so I can build better branding partners, advertise more effectively, sounds great all around. Nice job.
I’d like to give this a whirl, as an Omniture customer is this accessible immediately?
So when you say tie in to your existing campaign reports. This data can sit along side those reports or be added to dashboards etc, however I do not believe this will tie into your campaign reports with a direct correlation.
The complete list of metrics are video views, average rating, rating count, comments count, author and sharing site.
These aren’t completely standard events e.g I can’t build calculated metrics around this data. You can download this data into excel and do some more calculations on the data there.
There’s still a manual element to running these reports. You need a ‘human’ to go out find the videos you want to track then add them for tracking. Although from that point the population of the metrics listed above is automatic. You can group videos into logical groups which gives different reports for each e.g commercial, editorial etc.
The marketing criteria you mention is current restricted to keyword matches so this is quite hit and miss depending on what you are looking for.
If you end up testing this please comeback and share your thoughts on the solution. Thanks for the comment