Google Analytics

Using the built-in Google Analytics integration

vzaar is integrated with Google Analytics, so that you can get a variety of different information regarding the playback of your videos. Note that this feature only works for the (Flash-based) vzaar video player itself when using the vzaar iframe embed code.

We have recently released some plug-in code which allows GA events to be sent from both the Flash and HTML5 players. See: Google Analytics plug-in

Setting up GA

Go to your Google Analytics account and copy your web property ID or UA number from the page that holds your Tracking Code (Google Analytics calls this your Tracking ID) into the field under the Third Party tab on the vzaar Global Settings page. Click Save:

Google Analytics will now start tracking your video data, although this can take up to 24 hours to take effect. See the section entitled "vzaar Video Page on Google Analytics" below for directions to your video page on Google Analytics.

Here is a list of just a few of the features that Google Analytics tracks:

How many times your video has been viewed.
When the video is viewed.
Where the video is viewed (geographically).
How much of the video is played.

Using Google Analytics for the First Time?

If you are using your Google Analytics account for the first time you will need to activate your account (otherwise Google Analytics will not start tracking your videos). This will not happen automatically, but it is easily done by following these simple steps:

First copy the tracking embed code that Google Analytics will present you with when you first make your account.
Embed this code onto any website. Note: it does not matter at all which website you choose to embed this code on, even if the site does not contain any of your videos. This code simply enables Google Analytics to start tracking your videos.
Google Analytics will now track all of the videos on your vzaar account.

Note about pre-made blogs: There are lots of pre-made blogging websites out there and it may be that the above instructions are too general for the particular site. If this is the case then you can either take a look at their help documentation (e.g. search for "How to Add Google Analytics on Blogger/ Tumblr/ Wordpress" etc.) or you can ask one of our support staff for help setting up your tracking code on a particular website.

vzaar Video Page on Google Analytics

Once your account has been activated you can find your vzaar video page on Google Analytics in the following way:

Click the Behavior tab on the left-hand side of the Google Analytics page and then select the Events tab. At this point, you can either click Overview (to get an Overview of your video data), Top Events and Pages. To find your video page select Top Events as shown in the screenshot below:

Now if you select Event Label you will see a list of all of the videos on your vzaar account that has been actively played or seen. These are labeled by their vzaar video ID.

Selecting a video ID from this list and clicking Event Action will give you a breakdown of all of the actions on that video:

What do the Event Actions Mean?

When you select a video ID you will see a list of Event Actions like in the following image:

Here is a list of some of the actions on your videos that Google Analytics tracks:

playerLoaded is a count of how many times the vzaar player has finished loading.
frameGrabLoaded is a count of how many times the poster frame (thumbnail) has loaded.
playbackStarted counts how many times the video/audio has started playing. Note: this will not be counted twice if a viewer resumes playback after pausing the video.
pause counts how many times the video has been paused.
resume counts how many times a viewer has resumed playing the video after pausing.
percent (10-100) counts how many times this proportion of the video has elapsed.
seekbar counts how many times the player seek bar area has been clicked.
seekbarhandle counts how many times the player seek bar handle has been clicked.
fullscreenon counts how many times the video has entered full screen mode.
fullscreenoff is a count of the number of times the video has exited full screen mode.
soundOff counts how many times the mute button has been pressed.
soundOn counts how many times the sound has been unmuted.
buffered (s) counts the amount of time the video has buffered (in seconds).

If there are general Google Analytics terms that you need clarifying, take a look at their glossary here.

Creating custom reports

It is possible to create custom reports using the Custom Reporting tab on Google Analytics to show, for example, the number of plays for each video in a given date range. Google Analytics supports two types of report: an Explorer style report and a Flat Table report. The screenshot below shows an example of a Flat Table report:

The report in the above example is a list of vzaar video ID numbers and the number of times they have been played in the selected date range. Here a filter has been used to select only those video actions with the name "playbackStarted" but the other event actions can be filtered similarly. Filters can be used in conjunction with regular expressions to obtain more selective reports, as shown below:

These reports can be exported in a variety of formats, including PDF and CSV.

For more information about Custom Reporting, visit the Google Analytics help pages.

Other Features

A graph is given displaying each selection that you have made on your Google Analytics page:

Google Analytics can track a variety of different information about your viewers. For example, you can track the location of your viewers (by city, region, country/ territory, sub continent region, continent) and their language:

You can track which browsers, operating systems and Flash versions were used to view particular videos:

Finally, the date range of which data is shown can be adjusted at the top right-hand side of your Google Analytics page. This can be seen in the following screenshot: