Though the adoption of embedded media such as Adobe Flash and video players lets companies engage their visitors, it also eliminates the visibility into online activity that site operators have traditionally enjoyed. To meet that need, a raft of new companies like TubeMogul and Visible Measures have launched in the past few months, joining companies like Brightcove, which has been providing this with video delivery for several years, and Google Analytics, which recently unveiled an event model that tracks user actions such as interacting with a video player.
Now web analytics giant Omniture is getting into the game. The firm hopes that by tying video player interaction to visitor outcomes, it can give marketers back some of the visibility they’ve lost, helping them to better understand the effectiveness of online video.
At the Omniture Summit in Utah this week, the company is launching tracking technology that monitors user actions and ties them back to desired outcomes like forwarding a video, buying something, and or signing up. The system can also be used for in-page user interactions. Omniture, which has a market cap of roughly $1.5 billion and under 600 employees, earlier this year swallowed rival Visual Sciences, as well as site optimizers Offermatica and Touchclarity.
Built on the company’s ActionSource technology (for flash) and JavaScript (for embedded players), the new service tracks three aspects of online video: Engagement (how much, where, and what part of the video the visitor watched), effectiveness (whether the video makes visitors do something desirable) and how viral it is (where it’s hosted and who’s linking to it.) “We’ve got some things that a video tracking company can’t have, such as ‘How does the video affect the rest of your site?’” said Bret Gundersen, SiteCatalyst product manager. The new service is in beta with several video-heavy sites, including MTV.
But unlike TubeMogul or Brightcove, Omniture’s technology doesn’t actually deliver video. Operators need to have their own players or integrate Omniture’s tracking into their current service. “Using a video tracking service, you have to work with them to have them get the data into our analytics suite,” Gundersen said.
Video analytics are quickly becoming a crowded space. But Omniture may have an unfair advantage: Going beyond pause and rewind to look at the business outcomes of all those viral videos.
