I’ve been called an idiot many times in my life, but the number of times I’ve been labeled as such dramatically increased since I’ve become a tech blogger (you know how cranky pundits get).  Still, being generically called out as such in a recent post by Nalts (entitled: “Hey, Idiot. Missing “View Through” Data on Your Online PR? Don’t Even Read This.”) was just the sort of hook I needed to read through his review of a new analytics services called Tealium.

He took the time to go thru their rather dry PR material and glean out the interesting bits.

“Oh sorry. You didn’t know the phrase “view though” data? That’s because I’m exactly one hour ahead of you on learning about social media, and I’ll be two hours ahead if I wake up at 5 again tomorrow.”

The service Tealium provides seems to be quite revolutionary, at least for the online video business, and possibly audio podcasting as well.

Traditionally, it’s pretty difficult to directly track the relationship between campaigns, videos and messages that go viral to the direct, ROI-able hits to the target website. Typically, if someone clicks directly on a link from the video, you know that the message hit it’s mark.  What if the user doesn’t come back to the target website for several days?

That’s where Tealium comes in.

Tealium boasts that it can provide insights based on “historical browsing behavior,” so that empty-headed dope in PR can actually prove to the brand team that the stupid social-media and video-marketing campaign drove measurable action… even if it’s not immediate and direct.

Okay- are you awake now? That’s some serious shit.  I don’t know about this company, whether Webtrends and Google Anaytics are cooking up their own version of this, or whether they’ll snatch these guys up. And I don’t know how I feel about my website knowing my browser history… it’s creepier than cookies and “recontact” banners that follow you around like that awkward guy at work. You know? The guy you try to shake by going to the bathroom whenever he descends upon your desk with his bad breath.

This model — Tealium aside — is really good for the accountability of online-video and social media. We know that to judge a viral campaign on the immediate impact on web visits is like expecting the phone to ring off the hook because you placed one ad in the newspaper… there’s this thing called frequency that kinda works, dumb ass.

With someone’s “historical browsing behavior” we can presumably look at our leads by source, and see what correlated with longer time on site, and actual purchase.

Yeah.

That’s some pretty interesting stuff, and I’m not aware of any off the shelf analytics that do that sort of a job tracking things aside from high level stuff Platform-A or Doubleclick advertisers would have access to as a part of their ad platforms.

Keep an eye on these guys. I know I will.