Track your Video with Google Analytics

Bits on the Run players can send tracking data to Google Analytics. This is useful for users who already use Google Analytics for their website analytics, since they get all metrics in one place. Tracking is managed by a small video player plugin that is automatically activated with a single setting.

Metrics

The Google Analytics (GA) integration tracks the following events:

• The number of streams 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).

More info on exactly where these events can be found in GA is found in this GA support guide. Additionally, this support guide explains exactly how seconds watched and percentage played are calculated.

Note there are a couple of metrics the GA plugin cannot measure. These metrics are only found in the BOTR dashboard:

• The number of direct downloads for a video (as opposed to player streams).
• The number of times a video is embedded (i.e. the player is showing, but video is not started yet).
• Streams and time viewed on HTML5 devices (the GA plugin is Flash-only).
• The engagement chart for a video (GA gives you a rough sense though, with the percentage played metric).

Activation

Activation of the Google Analytics integration is straightforward. Simply insert your GA account ID in the properties of the players you want to use for tracking. Your GA account id can be found in the GA dashboard and should be something like UA-XXXXXXX-X:

It may take up to a day for events to start appearing in the event tracking section of your Google Analytics account.