As marketers become more sophisticated in their use of marketing automation, they invariably ask, “How do I track video viewing behavior?” My experience in this area goes back a couple of years when this question started to emerge with YouTube video embedding and Eric Hollebone’s original suggestion.

Until recently, there were limitations on understanding video behavior. With a standard implementation of Marketo, you can understand if a lead Clicked on Web Page Link or Visited Web Page. Thus, you could setup a trigger to run a Score or other flow based on a Video page view.

But visiting a web page with a video is not the same as watching the video; we can only assume a lead watched the video. Most marketers want to go beyond that to say how much of the video did a lead watch? And if they watched 50% of the video, what can we do to follow up? You could Score higher for more video watched; trigger a Sales Alert; or move a lead into an email program.

Naturally, Vidyard is a major proponent of the power of “progressive tracking” to better gauge a lead’s interest.

“This type of progressive lead scoring allows you to dynamically score leads based on actual consumption of the content, rather than binary transaction like “clicked on a link” or “downloaded a whitepaper.” This is important because a lead that actually watches 3 minutes of a product video is likely a much hotter prospect than someone that downloads a white paper and never reads it.” – Tyler Lessard

All content offers should have a purpose and a goal for lead generation. With a tool like Vidyard, it becomes possible for a video to offer more detail than a typical text page or PDF whitepaper. A video can have all of the standard actions and metrics, and more:

• Call to Action
• ROI based on consumption
• Collect leads
• Ungated SEO
• Influence on Opportunities
• Views
• Content actually consumed by seconds or percentage

Video is the only medium that permits a complete understanding of the consumption of the content.

Great! But how do you do that exactly?

You can do it all with Vidyard!

Step 1: Setup Vidyard Account

Vidyard will provide a username and login information. Login and look for Account > Integrations. 

Step 2: Connect Marketo and Vidyard

To connect the systems requires an API connection, so Spark users won’t be able to use Vidyard. Everyone else can do this very easily with the following key items from Marketo.

• Marketo user ID
• Marketo encryption key
• Marketo Munchkin ID
• Marketo API key

Each of these can be found within Marketo > Admin. Since the naming of these API keys is a little confusing, here are the screenshots and where to copy and paste.

Once you have the correct codes, Vidyard will verify the connection with your instance of Marketo.

You should then connect your YouTube Channel to Vidyard so more data can be pulled into Vidyard. You cannot use other video platforms at this time, so you will need the original video file to upload if you aren’t using YouTube.

Step 3: Setup a Player

Vidyard can pull in videos from just about anywhere, but it needs to collect each video into a Player. The easiest option is to use a video already on YouTube. The Player can contain one or more videos. In this example, I am only pulling in a single video.

The Player has quite a few settings in two groups.

• Attributes – this is how your video appears in Vidyard’s SEO and system.
• Tags – optional tags if you build a library of videos.
• Thumbnails – you can use the automatic one from YouTube or upload a custom shot. You can go further and edit the Splashscreens and do AB Testing.

Then you can choose the actual Player Options, which is how your player will appear to the lead.

• Permit Viral Sharing an customize the social message nad links
• Allow re-embedding on other sites
• Player skin settings
• Size of embedded video
• Player color
• Advanced, including “Require Email to Watch Video” which creates a new lead in Marketo via API.

Step 4: Create a Marketo Landing Page

Before you can record any data, you will need to setup a Marketo Program, which might look like this. At a minimum, you need a Marketo Page to embed the video on. You can also embed the Vidyard Player on your main website page, but remember to have the munchkin code on there, otherwise Marketo won’t see the video data.

The components might include:

• Landing Page for the Player
• iFrame Page and Form if you want to use a Marketo Form as a CTA at the end of the video.
• Triggered Campaign to add scores or Interesting Moments. (Of course, you can run scoring elsewhere).

Step 5: Embed Player on Page

Once you are ready to embed the Player in a Marketo Page, go to Embed Details and choose the embed code suited to your needs.

Now approve this page to use the embedded player just like a lead would.

Step 6: Track Views in Vidyard

Now this is what you’ve been waiting for. It can take up to 3 minutes to show up on the lead record, according to Vidyard. During this test in my Marketo Sandbox, there was approximately a 40-minute delay between the lead created and the delivery of viewing history. Vidyard assured me this is unusually long and that the first lead to go through does take more than 3 minutes.

When I used the iframe form CTA, the lead I used for the test in this section was instantly sent to Marketo and all of its consumption data was in the system within seconds.

The next part is to use this tracking data in your Smart Lists, Campaigns, and Reports. Vidyard delivers the data as a Visits Web Page activity. The system does not display the name of the Marketo page viewed, rather it shows

Vidyard.com/Watched How to Connect Digesto to Marketo: 50%

Where it pulls in the Player Name and the closest amount of consumption for 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%.

In this example, we can trigger a flow based on the amount of consumption. Vidyard is a big fan of scoring by video consumption. Here is the flow setup:

And here are the results in our Activity Log. Now I have a very Interesting Moment that shows my lead viewed 25% of the video. Of course, my trigger did not take into account 75% or 100% and it actually moved too fast this time, thus I would not use the Choice Step like this again. Instead, I recommend focusing on a single video consumption target to avoid the trigger activating at a lower consumption value. This is also a problem if you use the Visited Web Page filter because it will bring in the first value it has, which in this case was 25%.

NOTE: If your lead fast forwards over the video, Vidyard tends to not count that as a percentage of the video consumed. It will say the lead viewed the video, but not how much.

Other Settings in Vidyard

Vidyard is a powerful video platform, so there are quite a few things you can do with Players. Here are a few of the neat things you can do with both Vidyard and Marketo. I’ll let you try out Analytics and AB testing on your own since they do not directly involve Marketo.

Associate a Lead with Video Views

It is possible that even if you have someone’s email address, you haven’t cookied them, or they have cleared cookies somehow. Vidyard provides an option to associate an email with the view data using a special URL. This may be more important for you if you use a third party platform to send the email, or if you are not using Marketo.

1. Go to the Embed page

2. Select the first Sharing Page (Sharing must be enabled) and get this link:

http://embed.vidyard.com/share/[UNIQUE PLAYER ID]

3. Then append the code below and use the resulting link in your email. This particular code snippet: ?vyemail={{lead.Email Address}} is for Marketo only. Other systems will have a different code to append to the Embed Share URL.

http://embed.vidyard.com/share/[UNIQUE PLAYER ID]?vyemail={{lead.Email Address}}

Email Gating the Video

If you prefer to collect lead email addresses up front – before the video view – you can do this by changing the setting on Player Settings to Require Email. I don’t always recommend this, but this could be idea for late stage content or an extended demo video, prior to Sales receiving the lead.

Embed a Marketo Form as a CTA

Instead of a simple CTA link or button, you can also embed a Marketo Form using the iFrame technique. Usually this form CTA should be at the end of the video, not as the pop out CTA.

To have a Marketo Form as a CTA at the end of the video, have a form in an iFrame that you want to use. The best way is to create a blank landing page and then place the form either in the center of the page or near the outlined upper left border. If you have not done this before, it make take you a few tries to get the placement right so the form is visible at the end of the player.

Second, use this code:

 <iframe frameborder="0" width=<<width>> height=<<height>> src="PAGE URL"></iframe>

Third, take this code and place it in the CTA section of your Player. Click on the HTML Code button to replace all of the HTML with the iframe code.

When the video is done, your CTA form will pop up and request more information.

AB Testing with Vidyard and Marketo

Vidyard allows you to AB test Splashscreens. The data is collected in Vidyard and analyzed statistically. If you plan to build individual landing pages for Players or create a video resource page, AB testing will help you determine which screens are most compelling to your audience.

Since this post is about the setup of Vidyard and tracking video, I won’t go into this area of Vidyard.

Analytics

Vidyard also has an Analytics Center where you can view data about all players or each player. There are several filters available. If you select a Player, you can view specific data on views and engagement, including the viewing history of individual leads, Anonymous or Known.

And there you have it! You can now embed video into Marketo Pages and your website and monitor the consumption of each video, enabling Marketo to take action based on video viewing behaviors.

Remember to sign up for more Marketo tips.

Additional Video and Marketing Automation Tips

• Optimizing Marketing with Video
• Embedding Flash Video in Marketo
• YouTube in iFrame
• Detailed Flash and javascript
• Embed Vimeo Videos into Marketo
• Capturing Video Metrics in other ways
• Video and Email – essentially take a screen shot with the play icon and link it back to the landing page with the video. Email clients do not support video plays.

Disclosure: Vidyard provided a free trial account for this how to.