We just wrote in a post about how video marketing analytics is in its infancy.  Well, we here at emotion studios are hoping it grows up really fast. Because, after weeks of searching and attending conferences, we are confident that there simply isn’t a piece of software on the market right now that makes sense to purchase, especially as an agency.

What we want, for crying out loud, is a robust tool that measures video across the web, much like social listening tools do for content. But in life it’s easy to find a problem, can we come up with a solution?

Let’s take a look at this (lack of) video analytics situation like an entrepreneur. That is, all problems are opportunities in disguise. So, if we were to design video “listening” software that we wanted to use and justify paying for, what would it look like? We would want it to be able to analyze video from across the web in order to make informed decisions about the content, learn what our competitors are doing, and adjust for the highest ROI. Right? But how?

In the immortal words of Mr. Owl, “Leeet’s fiiind out.” That is, let’s build the perfect video marketing analytics tool together. If development costs were not a concern, here are the 14 features we would want to have:

1. No new platform needed, e.g publish natively – Our perfect tool can measure reach, sentiment, and brand by publishing video content directly on web and social channels rather than needing a specific platform or tool to publish. This is because, as an agency, we are not always in control of where and how our clients publish the content we create for them. We produce the highest quality video for them and at times they decide how, when, where, and how much it gets published. Yet, it’s our job to find out how it performs.
2. Measure specific videos across the web – Yes, platform specific analytic tools for video exist. But, as mentioned, we want something that works across the web. Which is probably why this tool isn’t available yet, even with the meteoric rise of video content in marketing. It appears to be really difficult to find a video file and understand the content and context. Honestly, we’re not sure it is even possible, but whoever solves this well is gonna get silly rich.
3. Enter a title and get the data – As an agency, we have multiple videos out across many different places online for many different brands and divisions within those brands. We need to be able to enter a title and know how it’s performing online, and here’s the important part, no matter where it was published.
4. Identify by channel –  As stated above, we need to easily be able to identify where viewers are watching the videos on social (FB, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, Snapchat, etc.), email, web, banner display, and mobile.
5. Average time watched – Much like the analytics on YouTube, FB, and Vimeo we want to be able to know how long and where the user stopped watching a video. That way we can all begin to know what type of video works best on which channels.
6. Where viewers dropped – Different to the average amount of time watched, this tells where, in specific videos, people stopped watching.
7. Click-thrus – This is the typical marketer’s metric about CTA’s and if/where viewers took action.
8. Influencers – Who is and would be likely to watch this specific genre of video
9. Demographics – Breakdown of viewership by age, gender, and most importantly affinities (entertainment, shopping, and other consumer insight/Acxiom data).
10. Similar Likes – What other types of videos and content the demographic is watching.
11. Adjust manually – Like other listening tools, we want to be able to adjust listening based on key filters.
12. Similar trending titles – Search similar titles to see how they are performing comparatively and who has produced and who is watching these trending videos.
13. Brand sentiment – Like social content listening platforms, how have the videos affected brand sentiment?
14. Reporting (pretty) – Because KPI’s and goals need to be measured against spend to achieve an ROI and then budgets get approved, all of the above must be organized and customized into easy to read, very pretty, colorful charts and graphs.

We realize that this list of demands, we mean features, may be considered way too pie-in-the-sky. But we know that there are some pretty smart developers out there (you know who you are).

You know how software developers can be. First they’ll say that we’re all crazy for asking for this type of thing and that it’s not really possible. They’ll make us feel less intelligent for even asking. But after a bit, they’ll say something like, “well, if we approached it like this, then we might be able to do it…”

And then everyone in digital marketing will be really happy.

Let us know what features you would like to add to the oh so needed video marketing analytic software.