Brands seeking to understand whether their online video efforts measure up now have a new resource

Brands seeking to gauge how their online video efforts measure up to competitors’ campaigns now have a new resource.

Analytics firm Visible Measures has released Trends, a Web-based tool that provides access to traffic, audience and engagement data from hundreds of online video campaigns.

Essentially, Trends is designed to help brands determine benchmarks for video ads, which can be used in both post-campaign analysis and for planning purposes. This has been an area that’s been lacking for the still young medium, where even experienced buyers often don’t know what to make of some of the numbers they receive on campaigns.

“One of the things we keep hearing from clients is that it’s very hard to build video plans that make sense,” said Matt Cutler, Visible Measures’ CMO. “Our users ask things like, ‘Is 1 million views a good mark or a bad mark? Is it realistic for an auto campaign to get 1 million views?’ These are the kind of questions we are getting.”

Going forward, Trends should provide some of these answers. The product, which includes both a free and premium subscription version, spits out data on campaign reach, demographics and the number of comments and ratings video ads garner. Visible Measures says it has collected data from campaigns run by over 100 advertisers, including Doritos, Nokia, Walmart and Toyota.

The firm organizes its campaign data into three buckets: social videos, movie trailers and Super Bowl ads (which will be available for a limited time). But users can sort by specific industry, type of ad, desired audience target and other granular factors as needed.

As part of its launch effort, Visible Measures is also rolling out a list of the top performing viral video ads from recent years as part of a public beta test. That list includes over 100 video ads to date.