Video Tracking

Video is starting to quickly become one of the most popular ways that sites are communicating and/or sharing information with its users. Sites like Hulu, Sling, and YouTube are growing in popularity. Portal sites, like AOL have a section that is completely dedicated to video. Media sites are putting more video on the sites than ever before, from video clips to full episodes. With this increased interest in video, it is important for accurate video tracking and to track the data that will help you understand how users are viewing the video. In this post, I am going to cover different tracking methodologies, video success metrics, the different pieces of information that you might want to capture about the video and video KPI’s.

Web Analytics Tool is installed…..Now What?

Now that we have Coremetrics installed on the site and have run a few reports to make sure the reports were showing up the way that I wanted and worked on a low hanging fruit (checkout process), now I had to come up regular reporting to see how the site was doing on a regular basis to see how the site was doing on continuous basis. Over the years, I used different variations of weekly and monthly KPI reports. In this post, I am going to have an example of a couple of different weekly KPI reports that I have used and a monthly KPI report that I have used. In the weekly KPI report example, the KPI’s will media based and in the monthly KPI report, the KPI’s will be retail based so you can see the different KPI’s that I have used in both industries. You will notice a similar format to what Eric Peterson has in his BIG Red Book of KPIs. I have used part of his suggested format, but changed the format around for each company that I worked. Since I first got into web analytics, I have had several challenges with the KPI reports. The first challenge is getting people to care about the KPI’s as much as I do. Well, getting people to care at all about the KPIs especially if they are not familiar with web analytics. The second challenge is really a continuation of the first challenge and that is getting people to even look at the KPI reports. If you get them to care about the numbers, then they will look at the reports. The question is how do you get people to care about the numbers so they will look at the numbers? I care about the numbers and that should be enough, right? Well…..unfortunately it is usually not enough. You need to get the other people to care about the KPI’s. The question then becomes, how do you do that?