Doing Web Video Analytics

Introduction to Web Video Analytics

As more people watch videos online and more videos are uploaded for entertainment, advertising, sales support and training, the ability to track user habits while interacting with those videos is becoming more important. This has lead to the creation of a whole new area of analytics called web video analytics tracks and measures viewer interaction with online videos.

Web video analytics enables tracking how on where the user first found the video, what they did when watching it (for example pausing, leaving, etc..).  It allows you to track viewing duration and any actions the viewer performs while watching the video.

For our purposes, a video includes a video stream, or embedded video. The video may be an advertisement, trailer, training video, television show or feature-length film.

Web video analytics is growing in importance in line with the exponential use of videos for everything from online product sales/support to video-based training.

What Are Web Video Analytics Tools used for?

It is desirable to monitor the following aspects of user video viewing habits:

• How did the viewers find the video?
• What sites did the video viewers come from?
• How long a video was watched for?
• Did they send the video link to a friend, and if so how, email, social network, other means?
• Did the viewer watch overlayed ads?
• Did they perform a click-through from the ad to make a purchase or request more information, or sign-up to follow the product or service?

Online/web video analytics tools are similar to those such as Google Analytics, used in general web analytics, but with some different/unique features specific to video tracking needs.

Every action that a viewer performs while watching a video online can be captured and analyzed precisely. Using any of the video metrics tools available.

So, by making use of web video analytics we can go some way towards determining how many viewers watched our video the whole way through; whether the video is too long and needs to be broken up into shorter segments; if people linked back to our video and shared it with their network.

All of this information can be used to improve our future video projects, even if it is not feasible to redo some of our existing video work. So it is definitely worthwhile investing time in setting up and learning how to use web video analytics to improve our video structure, content, and way we present our videos

There are many tools are available to manage your own video analytics. In our next article we will look at the various Analytics tools available to measure online viewer-video interactions.