Online Video Metrics: How to Deal with Scrubbing?

Over at webmetricsguru.com, Marshall quotes the following key video metrics from Dennis @ Visual Revenue:

9 Essential Online Video Metrics

• Online video started
• Online video Pre-roll advertisement started*
• Online video core content started
• Online video Post-roll advertisement started*
  
  
• Online video positive consumption action
• Online video negative consumption action
  
  
• Online video ended
• Online video played, percentage of total
• Online video played, seconds

As another blogger points out, things get really interesting when you start to consider embedded videos.

There is a challenge that neither of these authors mention -- what about user timeline scrubbing? Video complete doesn't mean the same thing if the user fast forwarded through most of it. Logging total time, % viewed, and complete gives you a bit of insight into this. Consider this range of user behavior:

Description	Total Time Played	% viewed	Complete
Full view	12:00	100%	Yes
Fast forward to watch a 2 minute segment	2:18	18%	No
Screencast how-to view with pause, play actions while following instructions	16:00	110%	Yes
Quick Scan, fast foward, watch, etc	5:00	24%	Yes

There are a lot of subtleties here: Do you double credit re-watching to allow > 100% viewed? If so, you confuse the real meaning of %. It's a good justification for logging % in addition to time, as otherwise, you could simply compute % as a normalization of user behavior across different video lengths.

We've created custom logging in the FreeIQ video player, both for the video embedder (who uses Google Analytics) and the management of the FreeIQ site. We simply log complete, but are working on a efficient way to capture some of the sublteties here.

From this logging, we computed an average 25% video completion for our Going Natural 2 series videos -- not bad given that these are greater than 20 minutes in length.