6 Dec 2011: Online customer intelligence provider Celebrus Technologies has made it possible for website owners who have embedded YouTube video content into their websites to monitor its usage by individual website users, and gather insight into how the content is received and engaged with. Additionally, where a website is embedded into Facebook via an iFrame, the website owner is now able to capture, record and evaluate individuals’ interactions with that specific Facebook content as if it were a normal website. 

The new functionality allows marketers to understand an individual user’s interaction with embedded YouTube content in detail – including what parts of the video content are of most interest or use, and which videos are of most relevance to that visitor’s motivations or intentions. This insight can then be used to help accurately personalise marketing communications to that user, be that via on-site content, or subsequent e-marketing campaigns. 

Katharine Hulls, VP of Marketing for Celebrus Technologies, comments: “YouTube videos are typically embedded into websites to provide engaging rich media to the target audience. It has until now however been impossible to understand individual-level customer interactions with those videos without hosting the rich media directly, which is prohibitively expensive and the analytics available have only been capable of providing overall results and trends.  However, through our integration with YouTube via its API, we can now show our customers precisely how, when and to what extent YouTube-hosted media is being engaged with by individuals – a vital indication of a customer’s motivations and intentions.”

The ability to also spot a user’s interaction with the website when embedded into Facebook allows marketers – who have previously been blind to such interactions – to build a far more complete picture of a given visitor’s use of the site. The insight may reveal a preference to access the site through Facebook, which the marketing team would have previously been unaware of, and so marketing budget can be directed accordingly.

Hulls continues: “Facebook has become a very valuable portal through which to reach a target market. So far, marketers have been unable to understand at an individual level which visitors are coming from Facebook, information which would help them more effectively target their customers via the most appropriate channels as well as direct their social media investment to best effect. This has represented a rather large hole in their appreciation of visits to their websites, which is a major issue considering the marketing potential of such a pervasive and popular source of customers, especially in the B2C world."