We’ve been hard at work on the next version of Carousel, and I’d like to give a short sneak peak at what’s coming up. This post will focus on what we’re calling Bulletin Impression Tracking.
Here’s the scenario: You’re in charge of running the digital signage for your organization, and someone comes to you with a complaint. They’re concerned that their bulletins aren’t being shown on-screen. And if they’re paying you to display their message, this is a justifiable concern. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell them exactly how often their bulletin was displayed?
Enter Impression Tracking. In Carousel 5.2, you’ll be able to track how many times the DisplayEngine has shown a bulletin (aka an “impression”), and the total amount of time that the bulletin was on-screen. Here’s how it works:
Enabling Impressions Tracking
When you’re creating a bulletin, after you have specified the bulletin’s schedule, click the “More…” button.
This will take you to the bulletin properties screen. You’ll see a new checkbox at the top of the screen that will turn on the impressions tracking for this bulletin. In my examples, notice that I’m also specifying a manual duration for this bulletin; this is telling Carousel that I want it on-screen for 40 seconds, regardless of how much text is in the bulletin.
After enabling impressions tracking, continue through the bulletin creation process as usual. That’s all you have to do. From this point on, whenever a DisplayEngine shows this bulletin, it will report back to the server, and the impression will be counted.
Reviewing Impression Stats
So far, so good. But now how can you get at the tracking statistics? Simply head over to the “Manage Bulletins” lists, and you’ll see a new attribute displayed on the bulletins that are being tracked. This is what you’ll see immediately after creating the bulletin:
Note the new “Impressions” attribute at the bottom. Since I just finished making this bulletin, it hasn’t had a chance to be shown on the screen yet. So, the impression count is zero.
After waiting for the bulletin to come around in the cycle a couple of times, I reloaded the bulletin list in my web browser, and now I can see that my bulletin was shown twice. Additionally, I can see that it’s been on-screen for a total of 1 minute, 20 seconds, which makes perfect sense since I asked it to be shown for 40 seconds at a time.
2 impressions * 40sec = 80sec = 1:20
So now, based on the information in this screenshot, I can report that this week, between the hours of 9am and 5pm, this bulletin has been shown twice, for a total of about 1 minute and 20 seconds.
As time goes on, you can get start to see some interesting data. Here’s a bulletin that I’ve been tracking for a couple weeks now:
It’s been on the screen in our conference room well over ten thousand times, resulting in a full day’s worth of on-screen time.
You can also start to get a look at how Carousel’s automatic bulletin pacing feature affects the on-screen durations. Make two bulletins, each with the exact same same schedule, but with different amounts of text. As time goes on, you’ll see that while both bulletins have the same impression count, the impression length favors the bulletin with more words, evidence that Carousel is adjusting the duration to account for the increased amount of text. Kinda neat!
In the coming days/weeks, I’ll highlight a few more fancy cool new features of Carousel 5.2. Stay tuned!
8 Comments
I can see this being useful – but is it going to take in to account when Cablecast is airing over Carousel? Just because it is running, doesn’t mean it’s actually seen on the air.
Tom
Hi Tom,
That’s a good point… but you should be able to get around it by using CableDisplay’s interrupt bulletins. These bulletins appear whenever there is a show scheduled to be on the air, effectively “interrupting” the standard cycle of bulletins.
As long as the interrupt bulletin is showing, any other bulletins (that are being tracked) won’t be shown, and therefore won’t be counted.
Hope this helps,
-John
Hmm… how does that work? Currently, when a show goes off, I have the ’show coming up’ bulletin, then it reverts back to the regular cycle…. when the show is over, it goes to the ’showing next’ bulletin, and then cycles normally… wouldn’t it count any pages running during the program that way?
I might not be using the same settings you’re suggesting here, but the alert pages only show up for about 20 seconds before and after the actual show playback.
Tom
Hey Tom,
You’re right about the “coming up next” and the “see it again” bulletins… But there’s a third type called the “interrupt” bulletin that is shown between the next/repeat bulletins. That’s the one that’ll override the regular bulletin list.
The timeline is:
* Cycle
* Up Next (20 sec)
* Interrupt (length of show)
* See it again (20 sec)
* Cycle
Hope this helps,
-John
Is there way to print out a run report for the impressions?
Am I correct that only the bulletin’s creator will be able to check the impressions checkbox? If that is true, there would still be no way for an administrator to check to see how many times the bulletin displayed if the bulletin creator failed to check the box. While the impression tracking does help, would’nt it be more helpful if there is a running count log of every bulletin displayed without relying on the bulletin creator to remember to check the box? Just a suggestion to try to eliminate human error.
Hi John, how many seconds equal an impression in the in-game advertising world?
sec. Please send me you opinion to mikeseaborne@gmail.com
That is correct, when creating the bulletin, the creator has the option to turn impressions tracking on.
Acutally, an administrator (or, anyone with the “manage bulletins” access right for that zone) can go in to the bulletin and turn it on or off if needed. So, if someone forgot to enable tracking, the administrator can fix it quite easily. And anyone who has the rights to view (but not edit) bulletins on that zone can see the impression statistics.
We didn’t enable tracking by default on each bulletin, because it’s a fairly chatty operation… The DisplayEngine needs to communicate with the server on every bulletin that is displayed. So, we leave it up to the users to decide which bulletins they want to track.
Hmm, I guess I’m not exactly sure what you mean. Could you explain a bit further?
Thanks, all
-John