So I filled out a Brightcove customer satisfaction survey a while ago, and gave some feedback about a feature I thought would be really cool: an intuitive way to share your video links and have them point back into the page they originated from, as opposed to going to link.brightcove.com.
Earlier this week I started chatting with Jeremy Merle, the product design and user experience director at Brightcove via email about the feedback I left. We set up a call for this morning at 10 AM EST, so I could clarify what I meant.
In the meantime, Brightcove rolled out Studio 4.2.1. In this release came a whole new level of analytics that’s available to everyone, including Attention Span analytics (which are really eye-opening) and other goodies like Engagement and Unique Viewers. The one I want to touch on here is Top Domains.
I was looking at this and thinking “Hmmm…Brightcove.com is accounting for almost 1/4 of our video web traffic. There has to be a better way to dump those visits and pageviews back into our domains.”
In essence, we’re sort of hemorrhaging web traffic because when people are sharing our videos via email, links, etc. from the players they end up at brightcove.com instead of back at our sites. One of our top referrers is Facebook; imagine if we could get all those views back to home base.
I brought up this point to Jeremy this morning on our call, since it was essentially what I was wondering when I gave my feedback initially and he did some research and helped me out on how to fix it.
Before I wrote this I went and looked at some other Entercom markets’ web properties and every one I saw was linked to link.brightcove.com, so I can assume a large chunk (if not all) of our markets need to make this fix. It’s as simple as going into the Publishing Module, clicking on the player you want to edit, changing the hosting URL back to the page you have the player embedded in, generating the code and replacing the embed code you already have.
It gets a bit hairy there, though, since you want to make sure you are putting the embed code inside the CSS div in Vortal (and not deleting mobile/iPhone code), plus local webmasters don’t have access to the homepage template holding the chromeless player (and the Watch landing page is a Drupal page) so I’m assuming the Digital team would have to get involved at some point to help adjust this stuff. I know I’ll be putting in a request to get it done here.
We’d really like to monetize our video content better in market here, and I think a little fix like this across all the players will grow our stats (and web traffic overall) quite nicely to make a stronger case to potential advertisers.
To see an example of how it will work, I have published the updated player in our Froggy 101 video page. Just click “Get Link” within any video and see how the link generates a URL direct to that video inside of the player on the site.
Merry Friday!
UPDATE (9.20.10): As Dan M. noted in the comments below, you don’t actually have to go in and change your embed code after updating your ‘Publish Module’ settings; they update automatically. Check out Dan’s comment for browser caching information.
