Written by Alistair Croll
Posted Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 5:00 AM PT

Omniture Gets Into Video Tracking

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.

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Topic: Software

Comments (8)

Hi,

I have some videos of the new Video Analytics that Omniture released to the public today – they gave me this information last week in a private session.

Go to my Omniture Site Catalyst improvements announced today at http://theanalyticsguru.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/omniture-site-catalyst-improvements-announced-today/

There’ll also be links to pages where you can see the movies I made last week with Omniture’s permission.

Marshall Sponder — 12:48 PM on March 5, 2008 Reply
tHANKS You

sohbet — 11:54 PM on September 18, 2008 Reply
You Thanks

muhabbet — 11:56 PM on September 18, 2008 Reply
thank you

DAnTEL — 4:20 PM on November 22, 2008 Reply
Another alternative to analytics user tracking tool available on the net is mvispy.com I have been using the service for past few months and it has worked out well for me. I have been able to do live user tracking. This is an excerpt from their website.

Watch visitors arrive at your site move from page to page, all the time gathering information about where the visitor came from, what keyword they used to find your site, displaying visitors ARIN information, what pages they visit, and communicate via live chat.

Watching visitor’s activity as it happens provides immediate knowledge of how visitors react to your web site and gives a perfect way to test any new site changes quickly.

MVI SPY tracks visitors as it happens and, at the same time, updates the database of traffic history to provide detailed web analytics. Analytics enables 80 web site statistics and reports, while allowing you to personalize the view that works for you.

MVI SPY provides a view of your web site’s traffic by tracking only visitors and does not display visiting spiders or bots. By excluding certain site visitors, such as your company staff, the displayed site visitors are very usable marketing tests of your site pages.

Andrews — 10:12 AM on December 17, 2008 Reply
nice post thanksss

medya — 8:32 AM on May 22, 2009 Reply
another fact-bending conservative, Wildman, calls another poster a hypocrite–not for something they actually did or said, but for what he THINKS they MIGHT do in a given situation.
What an asshat

penis buyutucu — 3:08 PM on June 25, 2009 Reply
I use ActionSource and Omniture for media tracking. It is very nice and pretty easy to use. I do get great reports from it.

Take a look at a blog I wrote about it.

http://theactionscripter.com/2009/07/13/omniture-media-tracking-in-flash-with-actionscript-4.aspx

theactionscripter — 1:41 PM on July 16, 2009 Reply

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