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By Cameron Church

Technical Channel Director, EMEA at Brightcove

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Tracking Brightcove with Google Analytics Event Tracking

Brightcove News

Today Mark Harpur, Regional Director of Sales Engineering (UK and Northern Europe), is a guest contributor talking about a great way to leverage BC3 and Google Analytics to give you great insight into your business performance.


As video on the web grows and companies start investing more in their online video strategies, it is becoming increasingly important for them to be able to measure user interaction with videos.

While basic video reporting can provide insight into how often videos being consumed and may provide some data around player metrics, to really get rich reporting you can’t beat integrating with an existing 3rd party analytics provider.   By integrating your video analytics with your existing website analytics you can use the existing data being captured to find out how different user segments consume your video.   This data can intern be used to provide more targeted advertising to users or even show them content others in their segment have watched, potentially increasing their time on site.


Brightcove allows you to integrate with a large number of analytics providers and if we have not already integrated with them, it is simple enough to create your own analytics swf to capture the necessary data.

One of the problems with integrating an existing web analytics solution is that a number of them are still very page based, while video is event based. If you are using Google Analytics, they have recently launched a beta program to track events, this event tracking method can be used to enhance the existing Brightcove Analytics swf for Google Analytics.

To use the event tracking you will need to make a few changes to the fireEvent function. First of all, since you will be using event tracking you can now pass the data in a set of variables instead of passing them all in one page view.  You will need to create variables to store the data that you want to capture, for instance the player load action which was tracked as

action = "'/playerid=" + experienceId + "/plid=" + playlistId + "/vid=" + videoId + "/" + eventName;


Can be change to

category  = "BC_event ("+experienceId+")"
action = eventName;
 str_label = "/Playerurl=" + experienceURL;


In the example above the category show up in your reports as  BC_event(Player ID), the action will be the event captured, in this case the Player load event and the label will be used to capture any additional data, in this example it is the URL where the player is hosted.

Once you have made these changes, you will need to change the pagetracker to the eventtracker.  Replace

_tracker.trackPageview(action);

With

_tracker.trackEvent(category ,action, str_label);


With these changes in place you will be all set up to start capturing event data about your videos.  Once you have event tracking enabled in your Google Analytics account you can click on the events tab under content to view your event data.  Below are a few screen shots of the reports you might generate.

Eventsoverview Events overview report showing overall events captured and the total events captured for each player.

By clicking on the show all link you can drilldown into the events for a specific player.

Player_events Events for player 18123449001

By clicking on one of the event you can see the additional data captured in the label field.
 Player_load
Additional data for player load event, showing on which pages this player is being viewed.

As mentioned previously, one of the great things about integrating with your web analytics package is that you can use you existing data to segment your video data.
Segmented Player  18123449001 events segmented by new vs returning visitors.

Well I hope this post has given you some insight into what can be achieved by integrating with your existing analytics package.

Good luck and happy analyzing.


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