Initializing Video Measurement Success
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This post is part of an on-going series on video measurement tips, tricks and best practices.
As we cross the finish line of video measurement basics, seeing the data flow in and the reporting flow out is cause for a small victory celebration. If you have been following along with this series, you should have a video tracking plan and a working video implementation or at least a basic understanding of what is involved. Now it is time to set-up your variables and reporting within SiteCatalyst. For this post I will use the sample player and variables from the sailing video.
The Variable Map
Before opening SiteCatalyst, I recommend taking your measurement plan spreadsheet and creating a new table for a variable map. The variable map lists all the variables to be used, the variable labels, and the settings needed within SiteCatalyst. Adding a final column with a sample value or two can be very handy for later reference and will serve as a reminder of the kind of values expected in each variable. The following table lays out the variable map for our sample sailing video.
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Variable Settings
As you can see in the table, most of the variables have basic settings, which any SiteCatalyst user with Administrative privileges can set-up. Three variable settings will require Client Care or Adobe Consulting support to enable. These variables are the Videos traffic variable enabled with pathing, the Videos conversion variable enabled with full subrelations, and the Content Type conversion variable enabled with full subrelations.
Note: Even though full subrelations are automatically enabled in version 15 of SiteCatalsyt, the setting for full subs still needs to be manually turned on for these two variables in order to use the video management reporting wizard.
Once you’ve labeled and enabled your variables using the Admin Report Suite menus, the next step is to map the context data variables to specific SiteCatalyst variables.
Context Data
New versions of the measurement libraries include context data variables, such as the three seen in the sailing video example (Domain, Player Name, and Duration). Context data variables work with processing rules to map friendly variable names to specific SiteCatalyst variables. Processing rules are only available in SiteCatalyst 15 and can be found under Admin > Report Suites > Edit Settings > General > Processing Rules.
For the sailing video, I’ve set-up a processing rule that checks to see if a.media.channel is set. If it is set, then I populate three eVars with the three context data values.
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The Wizard
The video reporting wizard creates default video reports using the variables set in the report suite. The wizard can be found in Admin > Report Suites > Edit Settings > Video Management > Video Reporting. As can be seen in the screen shot below, the eVars and Custom Events fields contain required variables. If these variables are not set or do not have the right settings, the wizard will not build out the video reports, so make sure to double check your variable settings. In addition to the required eVars and events, I highly recommend including a prop with pathing enabled. This prop, populated with the video name, will provide the ability to analyze the order in which videos were viewed. The variables required in the wizard are all part of the standard variable mapping implementation and should be included in any video measurement plan.
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The wizard also contains the option to add Complementary Variables. By listing your additional video variables here, the variables will be moved from their normal locations under Custom Conversion or Custom Events and will be displayed under the Video Reports menu. No functionality within these variables is changed during the move; it is simply a preference for where to find the variable reports. I have opted to include all my additional video variables within the wizard so that my video data can be found in one location.
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The Reports
After completing the wizard, the new video reports can be found at the bottom of the left-hand navigation within SiteCatalyst, in a drop-down labeled “Video”. Here you will find the three basic video reports, Video Overview Report, Videos Report, Video Detail Report, as well as the additional Video Events and Video Variables. The SiteCatalyst Video Measurement documentation provides an excellent overview of these basic reports, so I will not cover them here.
In my next post I will highlight a few advanced video measurement analysis tricks which take the data being collected during video playback and provide the context and meaning to study video strategically.