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A few months back Omniture released sitecatalyst 14. Apart from a major interface overhaul, the other big announcement was inbuilt video metrics. This came as great news for all those sites who rely on video content or video promotional material. Traditionally video tracking in Omniture was quite tricky to implement and relatively expensive due to the need to use multiple sucess events to achieve a reasonable level of detail.

So whats the problem? So a tradditional implementation of video may call say a sucess event for the play of the video and sucess event for 50% viewed and a sucess event for 100% completed. That way with a bit of calulated metric majic you can tell how many people stopped watching between the play and 50% and between 50% and 100%. Depending on how granuala you wanted to go that meant a sucess event for every percentage marker in a video and not just an event, but a server call. The problem with server calls is they cost money.

So to get round this issue in Sitecatalyst 14 Omniture proposed to use a cookie to store the data at certain set points during the play back of a video, they event offered to store a by the second value for a complete picture of playback rates.  This is great for Omniture no processing on the events or second by second because they store it in the cookie. But you have to process this information at some point right? It’s no good for anyone if that data just stays in the cookie. So Omnitures solution processes the data in the cookie either at the end of the video play or when the user navigates elsewhere on the site. Still great until you consider the action of a user ending a video play by closing the browser or typing a new URL in the address bar. So in that instance assuming the browser does not delete the cookie Omniture will process that data on the next visit.

The problem for publishers and indeed e-commerce type slots that return visit may never happen. We all hope that it will but there’s no gaurantee that that’s going to happen. So in a situation where you are relying on Omniture video data to say predict video ad-revenue or other important stats that need to be more accurate that qualitive this could be an issue. The only option available in this case is to stick with the traditional method of video reporting. The good news for all is Omniture will be introducing a new feature in video reports which allows you to use the same preset video variables but set them to process on trigger rather than from the cookie. The bad news is this will still cost you server calls. But you can’t have everything.

The new feature is expected in the next point release available before 2009. Will report more when its released.

Have a video metrics technique, question or story you would like to share? Comment away!