How to Track Your Viewers Using Google Analytics?
You will find below a detailed overview on how to track who is viewing each one of your MyLiveTV live streams or videos using Google Analytics.
The Google Analytics plugin for the MyLiveTV Player is designed to help you understand how well your video content is performing online. The plugin tracks events that occur in the player, aggregates it, and passes along the relevant information for tracking within Google Analytics.
- A Google Analytics account with event tracking enabled. If you do not have access to Google Analytics or event tracking, you can register at [http://www.google.com/analytics/].
Note – You do not need to have the Google Analytics tracking code present on the page with the player for tracking to function.
Once you have a Google Analytics account, tracking data via the plugin is a snap! It simply requires a small modification to the MyLiveTV code you use to embed your player.
All you need to change is the Goggle Analytics tracking number in the MyLiveTV code before to embed it in your website. See below where is the Google Analytics tracking number located in the various MyLiveTV players code.
Single Player
Just replace the bold number on the below code by your Google Analytics number.
Single Live Stream Player
Just replace the bold number on the below code by your Google Analytics number.
Playlist Player
Just replace the bold number on the below code by your Google Analytics number.
The terminology used is described by way of an example.
The following describes the playback of a 10 minute video and the expected results.
1. Viewer starts playing the video and watches the first section. This generates a Video Play,increments Percentage Played by 20%, and increments Seconds Played by 2 min.
2. Viewer skips the second section. Percentage Played or Seconds Played remain unchanged.
3. Viewer re-watches the third section 3 times. This increments the Percentage Played by 20 while the Seconds Played counter is incremented by 6 min.
4. The viewer watches the fourth section and stops playback. This increments the Percentage Played counter by 20%, and increments the Seconds Played counter by 2 min.
Now that your Google Analytics plugin is installed and configured, you’ll want to start looking at the data being sent out about your videos.
Google Analytics aggregates this data into reports, each of which can help to answer some specific question you have about your viewers. We enumerate these questions below, and demonstrate how to demonstrate a report that helps provide an answer.
Note - Google Analytics generally updates its data once per day, at midnight, but it make take up to 48 hours for event tracking data to first appear.
Overview
Once you have logged into Google Analytics, click on “Content”, then “Event Tracking” to get the following overview:
By itself, this screen doesn’t tell you a whole lot; it is simply a list ordered by the number of events in each category.
Categories
From the Event Tracking / Overview page, you can click on Categories to see all categories of dataget the following overview:
On that page you will be able to see three categories:
- Video Plays
- Seconds Played
- Percentage Played
Video Plays
How many times were each of my videos viewed? and: How viewers are watching each of my videos? Clicking on Video Plays from the Categories page will bring up a report detailing which videos were started, listed by the URL of the video file.
Note - If viewers are re-watching your videos, the value of “Total Events” will be greater than the number of Unique Events
Geographic Information
Where are my viewers located? and: What languages do my viewers speak?
It is often interesting to see where a video is popular geographically, and to know the language they speak. After drilling down into a specific video, select from “Language”, Continent, Sub Continent Region, Country/Territory, Region, City from the Dimension drop-down:
A report will be displayed outlining where each view of the specified video came from.
Additional Tracking Options
Google Analytics offers so many tracking possibility that it is difficult to describ them all here. You also have the possibilty to narrow down your analyses to the number of seconds a videos has been viewed in your home town, quite amazing
Many thanks to LongTailVideo for providing many of the information listed above.
