Inside Online Video

How to Catch Cheating Video Promoters

by Mike Abundo on November 25th, 2007

In response to Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s cheating techniques, Kevin Nalts tells marketers how to catch a promoter cheating in a viral video campaign.

1. It’s a good idea to have some ways of tracking impact beyond views. This means looking at conversions (clicks to website after watching video) or brand recall (through Dynamic Logic or similar studies).

2. The conversion rate from a video to a site is very low, but if a video spikes to 100,000 views and fewer than a hundred people visit your site I’d suspect foul play. Especially if the URL is in the description tag and there’s a good reason to visit.

3. Watch out if your video has excessive views but very few comments. If the ratio of views to comments is atypical then the views may not be real. My videos range from 10-30,000 views and I get 200-300 comments on average. That’s about 1 in 100 making a comment, which is a fairly typical number. Naturally this ratio varies based on the content and where the video is seen (my regular subscribers are more likely to comment than those viewing a video on a homepage).

4. There aren’t yet good techniques to determine if a video has been played in its entirety and this is quite important. Most videos aren’t completed, but most online-video sites count a “view” if the viewer watches at least 15 seconds. As a YouTube partner I have “autoplay” on my channel page, which drives significant views but limited interaction.

5. If your agency is providing you with feedback or verbatims from the comments (like “that was the best video I’ve ever seen”) you may want to check the username to see when the account was created and what other activity that individual has. A sock puppet account usually has few views, no videos of his own, and a fairly incomplete profile.

Now that their spamming secrets are out, wonder how many cheaters will be caught. Further down the line, wonder if community outrage against cheating will prompt video-sharing sites to offer deeper analytics.

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