Analytics & Reporting—Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft PerformancePoint Server,

As outlined in section 5.11 above, analytics and reporting are key to ensuring the commercial success of the online video service, understanding user preferences and patterns of behavior, and supporting the effectiveness of ad campaigns. These requirements can be met through a

combination of Microsoft and third-party services and Microsoft products:

 Microsoft Office SharePoint server provides reports on the status of workflows, and provides a

rich set of data points on content items which can be used for building reports for the Content Manager role. Microsoft Commerce Server provides reports on the sale of content offerings for the Content Marketer and Executive Producer roles.

 Microsoft Advertising Solutions for publishers and FAST AdMomentum provide reports on ad

sales and ad inventory for Ad Sales Managers, and help Media Buyers understand the effectiveness of their ad campaigns by analyzing ad impressions, click-through-rates, and more.

 Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides reports on user profiles and service requests for the

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 FAST ESP‘s Search Business Center provides reports on user queries and content

selections, helping Content Marketers to optimize query results and content offerings to match users‘ demands.

 A Web analytics service is used to track user behavior through the end-user

interface. For instance, Microsoft adCenter provides comprehensive analytics

capabilities (http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising/adcenter-

analytics/).

 Windows Live Services provides further insight into user behavior.

 Microsoft SQL Server (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/) is used to aggregate,

store, and analyze reporting data. Different SQL Server modules are used to support these functions:

o Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services gather the data into the data warehouse and

manage the creation of SQL Server Analysis Service OLAP cubes.

o Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse stores the reporting data.

o Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services process reporting data into required formats to

support decision making.

o Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services produce rich interactive reporting formats,

delivered through the Web browser, e-mail reports, or printable documents.

 Microsoft PerformancePoint Server

(http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/) is used to manage the

planning/reporting cycle and to produce dashboard reporting for the Executive Producer role.

Web analytics

A Web analytics service is necessary for collecting data at scale about how users are interacting with video content and ads. For example, Web analytics can help track the conversion of anonymous users to registered users, and help track the success of how many times ad X was clicked or how many times a particular piece of content was viewed. Furthermore, Web analytics can be combined with demographic data to provide value-added reporting as described in a later section.

The following are some examples for Web analytics reports. The examples are taken from

Microsoft adCenter, the digital advertising solution for Microsoft‘s online properties like msn.com and live.com.

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Path analysis visualizes navigational paths from or to a particular page in an interactive, graphical view, helping content service providers to understand where users are getting lost, and giving them ideas on how to better guide users through the service.

Dashboard

A dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of essential site statistics. In adCenter Analytics, it is customizable via drag-and-drop to meet specific

information needs.

Treemap

The treemap view segments users by age and gender, etc., in an easy-to- digest visualization and enables cross-referencing with site page use.

Time trends

With time trend reports, content service providers can see how traffic for a

particular item has changed in time. This report is useful for

understanding when it was that an item started to contribute (or stopped contributing) traffic to the online video service.

More segmentation

In addition to segmenting reports by age or gender, it is also useful to segment reports by age/gender composites so that service providers can see whether women more than 50-years-old are really into soaps or not.

Additionally, Web analytics can also be useful for tracking page load errors and component load and streaming connection errors through the end-user interface.

Reports for individual business functions

Microsoft Commerce Server, Microsoft Advertising Solutions for publishers and FAST

AdMomentum, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM provide the reports needed by individual business functions and user roles, as described above.

For many roles and tasks, this is sufficient. For those users who typically just interact with one system, this system‘s standard reports are likely sufficient. For instance, the Content Manager who would be interested in monitoring the asset queue and content preparation workflow can rely on reports generated by SharePoint Server.

Aggregated reports—dashboards and scorecards

To provide an aggregated view, like the Executive Producer scorecard shown in Table 4, data from different systems needs to be aggregated, analyzed, and visualized. For instance, the CRM

component can report on how many new users registered with the service, the search engine can report on what people have been searching for, and the e-commerce component can report on what pay content people actually viewed, but only a data warehouse with analytics and reporting services can aggregate all this data into a coherent view on how the online video service is performing commercially (Figure 72).

103 Figure 72: Scorecard and Strategy Map in Microsoft PerformancePoint Server

To also track customer satisfaction, the Executive Producer might also want to know about users‘ support requests. If these are tracked in the CRM system or a customer care system, they can be aggregated into the scorecard or dashboard as well.

Aggregated reports require system integration

While outside the scope of this blueprint, typically the financial data and information about the assets (most important, content licenses) are tracked in an ERP system like SAP or Microsoft

Dynamics (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/). As a result, all components of the proposed

blueprint that handle data about customer transactions or assets have to be connected to the ERP system. In the ERP system, service providers also could track how much advertising revenue and/or pay content revenue was generated by an asset or a user.

While Microsoft Commerce Server holds the content offerings and allows users to perform transactions, DRM licensing and protection is processed via Microsoft PlayReady, triggering royalty payments that are then performed by the ERP system.

Similarly, the digital advertising component would be tracking the success of ads through its billing component based on information about which inventory items have been used and at which rate (among other ad criteria).

Finally, the Web analytics platform tracks navigation and can report on all content use. In a more sophisticated scenario, every interaction a user has with the video could be recorded to

understand how long people watched a video, when they paused it, which scenes they replayed, and so on.

Value-added reporting

When managing an online video service, Executive Producers and Content Marketers have scenarios where they would want to see the effect of the combination of revenue models for specific video content. For example, this asset Rambo is generating X revenue through Contextual

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Ad A and Contextual Ad B. To meet this information need, SQL Server Integration Services can combine data from different systems into the same place, SQL Server Analysis Services can process the data, and PerformancePoint Server can produce dashboard reports.

An Ad Sales Manager may be interested in the success of a targeted advertising campaign to a particular demographic—for example, 2 million 18 to 35-year-olds from region X clicked this ad. Key campaign parameters help to identify or validate a demographic that needs to be passed between the profile services (could be Microsoft CRM, MS ASP.NET membership and profiles). To meet this requirement, user profile properties and Web tracking data would need to be passed to the digital advertising solution so that it is then able to aggregate demographic data against each ad or campaign.