Video Commerce Analytics with Eric T. Peterson
Last month, Web analytics thought-leader Eric T. Peterson spent a few minutes with me to talk about Video Commerce analytics. Eric is the author of Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators. In addition, Eric founded Web Analytics Demystified Inc. in 2007, a successful consulting form with prestigious clients across all internet segments. Eric is a long-time member of the web analytics community and a frequent speaker who is often cited in articles about web analytics.
Here is the transcript of our conversation:
Xavier Casanova: Hi everyone, I’m Xavier Casanova from videoretailer.org, and today I’m going to interview Eric Peterson who is the founder and CEO of Web Analytics Demystified, a leading consulting firm for analytics. So Eric, I have a few questions for you regarding the use of analytics and video, and there’s a lot of things that are still to be defined when it comes to measuring how people interact and how people use video. And so, in your opinion, first of all, why is it important to measure how people interact with videos?
Eric Peterson: That’s a good question. Like anything you do on the internet, you need to measure interaction and engagement with video because you need to know what you are getting back out of your efforts. If you are spending money to produce videos, if you are spending money to convert existing videos into a web writing format, if you’re taking the time to put them up on youtube and other repositories, you need to know what you are getting back for that. Are people watching the videos? Are they interacting with the videos, if there’s a flash or interactive component. Are those videos actually driving people back to the website, if it’s designed to sell products or drive some kind of converstion event, is that event actually happening? So I think you have to measure video in the same way that you measure your paper click marketing, your banner advertising, your emails. It’s another communication medium in the digital channel.
XC: And so one of the questions that people, actually, frequently have is, “Okay so, I have to measure video, I get it. I understand. Now, what to measure? What are the things that I should be looking at when assessing the effectiveness of my video content.”
EP: Sure. Bare minimum: Click through rates, conversion rates. Do you drive people back to the website? If you’ve got video content that doesn’t have a call to action, that doesn’t have a direct click in it–you’re really going to struggle to know how important and how useful that video is for your site and for your brand. So try to have some kind of call to action, a custom landing page if you can’t get a click into it. The other thing to look at it, if you have the capability, is to measure video as a component of the engagement that a visitor has with you on an overall basis. Do people who watch video have a higher level of engagement? Are they more likely to come back to the website? Or more likely to come back with a greater recency–a greater frequency to the website? How does that video interaction change the relationship you have? Should deepen it. Should deepen it, right? But, we saw a presentation today that said that the use of video at the Google website optimizer site actually decreased the likelihood of conversion. So you have to get in and you have to measure that, does video drive conversion? Does video drive engagement? I think those are the two critical measures.
XC: And in your experience as a web analyst and all the consulting work you’ve done for some of the top firms in the US, can you point us to some examples of people that have successfully measured video, and–or tools that do a particularly good job at doing that?
EP: Yeah. Do you mind if I use a European example?
XC: Sure
EP: Is that okay? I ask that, because actually, I did a white paper earlier this year with a company called Nedstat, out of the Netherlands and across Europe. Nedstat has actually, surprisingly good video measurement capabilities with their java script integration. They have both the ability to measure the video on your site, but also distribute the video through YouTube and other formats and other technologies. They’ve got a client, Fabchannel. Fabchannel is bringing concert video and music videos to the masses. Fabchannel was able to use Nedstat’s technology to actually get a revenue sharing deal with Universal, and were really very successful with this because of their ability to measure online video. So, if you have a Nedstat, or perhaps if you have a Liveclicker, some type of technology that lets you understand what’s being watched and where is it being watched? What are those actions that people are taking after they watch that video? That’s really what you need to have.
XC: So actually brings up an interesting point here which is, the video content doesn’t necessarily reside on the original website. Often times, that content is going to be served on a blog or on youtube or somewhere else. How do you go about measuring video outside of your site and creating a wholistic view of the effectiveness of your computer program?
EP: There are a lot of different strategies. I think the reason that we’re seeing companies like Liveclicker emerge, Visible Measures, and other technologies out there means that it’s a problem that has yet to be solved. If you’ve got a flashbased video player device, you obviously have the opportunity to use action script and imbed the action script that says, “I am here, and I am playing, and I’m going to report that back to you.” But It really depends on the medium that people are playing in. If somebody downloads a video to an Iphone, you simply might not know, right? So there’s going to be instances where you can know directly because it’s on your own site. You can know indirectly, because it’s in a measurable situation some place else. Then, there are going to be those gaps of your experience.
XC: Thank you very much for your time, Eric. I appreciate it.
EP: Absolutely. It’s good to talk to you again.
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