Video and Measurement
For a lot of reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about video lately – not only in terms of how it can help build brands and community through social media and PR, but specifically how we can understand what the results of this brand and community building mean.
In most cases, unless you’re spending a ton of money on analytics packages and hosting videos internally, you get one metric about your online video efforts – views. In many cases, what a “view” means is not even particularly clear – is it based on people watching a whole video or just the first few seconds? How are offsite views counted? In general, measuring views of a video is a blunt metric that gives a general idea of how many impressions a video gets. Once again, we’re measuring eyeballs.
Katie Paine, of KDPaine and Partners, often calls out measurement companies and consultant for focusing on impressions in online media, when what really matters is action, and I think it’s just as important for understanding how online video fits into the architecture of persuasion. Consider which is the more valuable insight – knowing the number of people who watched some part of a video, or knowing how many took action at a specific point in a video, and the percentage of people who took action as a result of one message versus another.
One of the reasons that this has been on my mind in the past few months is due in large part to the fact that one of my clients – Overlay.TV – is making this type of measurement possible by allowing content producers to make any video interactive by adding links, text, animation or even video-in-video and in-video chatting.
So now, in addition to measuring impressions, by simply adding a few elements to a video, content producers can measure, through their existing analytics software, how many of those viewers actually took action and visited a site, purchased a product through an affiliate, or entered the sales funnel as a direct result of the video. By using the chat widget, they can also gauge real-time reactions to a video and begin to understand more about the content they’re producing and how it relates to the audience.
Overlay.TV came out of beta late last week, and is now available for public registration. It currently offers a number of widgets that make it easy to add measurable interactivity to any video in just a few seconds. If online video is part of your marketing mix, I highly recommend checking it out and experimenting with the tools. Overlays can be as complex or simple as you need, so it’s easy to add a few quick links or create a fully interactive video, and even easier to measure the actions that come out of it.
As online video evolves as a marketing medium, measurement that goes beyond impressions and allows marketers to better understand how a video drives action will be more important than ever. To see it in action, check the newly-launched Overlay.TV or read about the company on TechCrunch.
Thanks for the plug, and thanks for this tip . What we’re seeing is huge difference in engagement levels on videos and the notion that we can parse that down to individual parts of a video is really intriguing.
What will be really interesting is when we can apply this same measurement technology and methodology outside the traditional web to network content. Then television advertising will be forced to measure itself on interactive’s terms, rather than the other way around.