Ever wanted to know how many visitors view your website videos?

Sunday, 11 January 2009 00:00

Google Analytics Have you ever wanted to know how many visitors view your videos? If you had a 15 min video on one of your website pages that didn't seem to be improving your conversation rate, would it be useful to know how many of your visitors were viewing the video? Would it be useful to know how long your visitors were viewing the video for? What if that 15 min video was only being viewed on average for 15 secs, would you want to know it? Of course the answer is YES.

Knowing how your website visitors get to your website and how they navigate your website has been achievable for years, and thanks to Google Analytics, it's been achievable for FREE! However, until recently there hasn't been an easy way to tie in how many of your visitors viewed a video. Just because a visitor may go to that page on your website doesn't mean he will view the video on it. To my knowledge, there certainly hasn't been a way to tie in how long your visitors view a video for, that is, until now...

Thanks to Longtail Video and their JW FLV Media Player we can now fully integrate their player with Google Analytics so we will now know how many visitors start viewing a video, how many pause a video, and how many complete/finish viewing the whole video. And best of all, the player is free for non-commercial websites, and dirt cheap for commerial ones. The FLV player is also extremely customizable, and as close to a "no-brainer" as it gets when it comes to implementing the player on your own website.

The video below is a high definition 16:9 cartoon that is 10:53 mins in length, and it's being tracked with Google Analytics.

If the movie isn’t playing, download a new ADOBE FLASH PLAYER.

Below shows the visitor statistics for all the videos on this website for 1 month, click the image below to open it enlarged in a new window. Alternatively, you could see a PDF of it by clicking here. You might find the PDF easier to read.

As you can see from the above, anything that starts with /start_video/ is where a visitor started watching a video. Item #2 is a youtube playlist on another page on this website. Notice how the time on page is 1:32, so for all visitors viewing this youtube playlist with an average video length of 6 mins, the average visitor only views the first video for 1:32 mins. Item #7 (/complete_video) is the amount of visitors who watch the same youtube playlist through to the end. This is valuable information, and has been extremely beneficial when it was implemented on my company's website (my employer), but alas I cannot share the video statistics with you due to my NDA. Anything starting with /pause_video/, as the name suggests, is where a visitor paused a video. I haven't really found this very enlightening, but it's good to know that I can look it up if needed.

How do I start using the JW FLV Media Player?

First download the JW FLV Media Player files from Longtail Video. Once you've download the zip file, extract the files.
Create a directory in the root directory of your webserver called embed.
Upload the player files from #1 above to the embed directory you just created on the webserver.
If you're going to have the video files on your own webserver upload them to a directory on your webserver. You do not need to do this step if you are hosting your video files somewhere else, such as on youtube.
Add the player code to any webpage you want to have a video on. Below is a sample of the player code.

Player Code

Below is the player code I'm using on this webpage. You can also use the excellent JW FLV Media Player documentation by clicking here.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/embed/swfobject.js"></script>
<div id="player">HD Cartoon</div>
<script type="text/javascript">var so = new SWFObject('/embed/player.swf','mpl','528','297','9');so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');so.addParam('flashvars','&file=http://garethhooper.com/images/videos/hdcartoon.m4v&bufferlength=5&controlbar=over&image=/images/whyadvocare_splash01.jpg&plugins=googlytics-1');so.write('player');</script>

Comments (3)

...

Gareth, we worked together at Blockbuster UK about 10 years ago. I hope you're enjoying the USA! This info is excellent, I added it to our website. The GA integration is priceless!

Thanks Mate,

Terry

Terry Smith , January 16, 2009 | url

...

Did it work with the youtube_format22.php file ? I dont think so but if you can tell me your point of view

Thanks a lot

Clement

Clement , April 19, 2009 | url

...

Hi Clement,

Yes, it does work with the youtube_format22.php file. In fact it works with anything you specify the 'file' parameter to be, whether it be a path to a file or a youtube video.

A common thing people forget to do when trying to track video usage is to put the google analytics tracker code on the page as well. For example, here is mine:

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
[removed](unescape(""));

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-2286735-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}

The JW Player NEEDS that Google Tracker code, it doesn't replace it.

I use Joomla, and I use the Google Analytics Tracker Module http://extensions.joomla.org/e...33/details

I hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Gareth

Gareth , April 19, 2009 | url