Track your video with Google Analytics
Last updated on March 5, 2010
Bits on the Run players can send tracking data to Google Analytics. This is extremely useful for users who already use Google Analytics for their website analytics, since they get all stats in one place. Tracking is managed by a small plugin, developed by LongTail Video, that sits on top of the player.
The plugin
The Google Analytics plugin is designed to help you understand how well your video content is performing online. It takes advantage of Google's new Flash API for Analytics. This means you don't need any javascript on the page. It also means you will get statistics from players embedded on third-party websites.
The plugin tracks the following events:
- The number views for each video.
- The time visitors spend watching each video (e.g. 5 minutes).
- The percentage of each video watched by visitors (e.g. 75%)
- Visitor demographics (country, region, language).
A complete overview of how the events can be analyzed in Analytics can be found in the GA Pro plugin user guide (PDF).
Note the GAPro plugin is not free! A license is required, but starts at just €9.
Installation
Installing the plugin requires only one action: in the CMS, for every player you want to track, you should add the following string to the Custom flashvars field:
plugins=gapro-1&gapro.accountid=UA-XXXXXXX-X&gapro.idstring=||title||
Make sure to replace the UA-XXXXXXX-X part with your actual Google Analytics account ID.
Note you can also add a third parameter to let GAPro track videos by title instead of by filename (since filenames are all content.bitsontherun.com/...):
plugins=gapro-1&gapro.accountid=UA-XXXXXXX-X&gapro.idstring=||title||
It may take up to a day for events to start appearing in your Google Analytics account. The events from the player will appear under the *Event Tracking section of analytics. Here's a screenshot of the overview page:
