What You Need to Know About Business Video Analytics

There are two reasons to measure the performance of your business's videos: One, to justify your efforts so you can expand your company's use of video, and two, to reach your customers more effectively.

To give you the basics of measuring results for business video, we turned to an expert, Steve Vonder Haar, the research director for Interactive Media Strategies. He founded the company eight years ago to study the business communications market space. We last spoke to Vonder Haar in September for a look at measuring ROI.

"If you can't measure, you can't prove the value of anything you're doing," says Vonder Haar. But that doesn't mean that everyone needs analytics. If your company only streams a couple of webcasts a year, detailed analytics aren't that important.

"When you get to the point where your organization wants to make a significant commitment to video for day-to-day communications, that's when analytics becomes important," he says. You need to prove results to justify your investment.

Using Analytics
Begin digging through the numbers and you'll see that video analytics are about more than just counting visitors. "It's about understanding how people are using video and what types of messages are being communicated," says Vonder Haar.

Analytics can show you what part of the country is more receptive to your videos. If you're able to match the user's data with site registration information, you can see what individuals are watching and what they're taking away from your webcasts. If you see how long individual viewers are watching, you know who's interested in your product and might appreciate a follow-up phone call. Some analytics tools record mouse actions; viewers who enlarge slides for a better look are more interested.

Analytics Tools
The analytics tools you'll find will vary from vendor to vendor, Vonder Haar says, with some working behind a firewall and others working as hosted solutions. Those behind the firewall tend to be more limited in scope, he says, and are more useful for government compliance information.

For more sophisticated results, you'll want a hosted product. "Typically we find that analytics tools provide their greatest value in external communications environments," says Vonder Haar. While he doesn't want to single out vendors, since he works with them all, he says that Ooyala offers a rich set of tools, including the ability to track videos hosted on YouTube. For behind-the-firewall use, take a look at Accordant. There's no one perfect solution, though: "It's a matter of matching the analytics package to the specific information needs of the corporate end-user," he adds.

One of the biggest challenges to vendors now is that the analytic detail they offer is frequently greater than what most customers are inclined to use, says Vonder Haar. It's the end users who need to catch up.

For more on business video use, check back next month. We'll talk with Vonder Haar about integrating video with online retail sites and look at automated database-driven video creation packages.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net