Track Video Engagement with Vid.ly & Google Analytics

The reason video has become such a popular digital medium is because of its ability to engage audiences. Whether the video is highly relevant, or just plain cool, people love to consume video. To video producers, that engagement is critical. Moreover, measuring the engagement has become a vital component of any video project. That's why we've integrated Google Analytics with our Vid.ly feature. Configuration is very easy.

To set up your Vid.lys to be tracked by Google Analytics, just log into the Encoding.com User Interface. Expand the Vid.ly tab on the left and click on the Google Analytics tab that is revealed. That will bring you to the screen below. Enter your Google Analytics property ID and click Save Changes'.

Automating these steps through the Vid.ly API is also very straightforward. Using the UpdateUserSettings' action, simply set the GAID (Google Analytics ID) to your Google Analytics Property ID.



UpdateUserSettings

[User ID]

[User key]

[GAID]



That's it. All of your vid.lys new and old will be tracking through Google Analytics. Now let's take a closer look at how this is tracked in Google Analytics.

Best practice for tracking video in Google Analytics is to use the Event Tracking feature. The use of categories, actions, and labels allows you to specify things like Videos (categories), Percentage Complete (action), and Video Title (label), amongst many other parameters. Our implementation of tracking in Vid.ly records the following items as events in Google Analytics; Play, Percentage Complete (in 10% increments), HD enabled, Shares with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Delicious. This streamlines the implementation of video tracking immensely vs. hand coding event tracking and customizing the Google Analytics tracking code. A sample vid.ly report from Google Analytics can be seen below.

Once Google is properly set up in the Encoding.com Dashboard, you'll start seeing basic tracking data showing up in the Google Analytics tab of the User Interface. There you will see total, new, and unique views of your Vid.lys, as in the image below.

Google Analytics is available with the Vid.ly player as well as any of the third party players we support like FlowPlayer and JWplayer.

LINK:	http://features.encoding.com/blog/2014/03/07/track-video-engagement-vi...
	See more stories from encoding

Most recent headlines