JW Player Google Analytics Pro tracking

Question

I am working on a video listing website which uses JW Player and its plugins. Embed code of the video can be placed anywhere in the web but we need to track which video plays in which site and its count of views and plays.

We are using Google Analytics Pro plugin for JW Player to track the traffic. But is there any way for me to track the report to

1. See all the sites that the player is embedded on to see how many people played the video from that site
2. How many plays are done for each video from from these sites
3. Exactly which videos are played

Currently we are using following code inside JW Player

s1.addVariable('gapro.accountid', 'UA-21590286-1'); //alert(this.data.captions[this.slide]) s1.addVariable("gapro.trackstarts","true"); s1.addVariable("gapro.trackpercentage","true"); s1.addVariable("gapro.tracktime","true"); s1.addVariable("gapro.idstring","||Channel Name||-||Story Name||");

Following is a sample embed code for playing a video..

Thanks in advance for the support. Best Regards Deepu S Nath

Answer 1

The JW GA plug-in should report which site is hosting the player in the Hostname parameter.

1/ Check that when you play a video on your player embedded on a site, a GIF request is sent to google-analytics.com :

http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?
utmwv=4.9.2&utms=2&utmn=1209321314&
utmhn=www.longtailvideo.com&utmt=event&
utme=5(Video%20Plays*http%3A%2F%2Fcontent.longtailvideo.com%2Fvideos%2Fbunny.flv*
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.longtailvideo.com%2Faddons%2Fplugins%2F107%2Fget-examples.html%3Faddon%3D107%26vid%3D292%26q%3D)

(I have truncated the request which should be much longer).

2/ Confirm that the utmhn value reported is the hostname of the site where the player is hosted. It looks like the JW player plug in reports the Video Play as an Event where the Category is Play, Action is the file source URL and Label is the URL where the video is played.

3/ In Google Analytics, look for a report displaying Event Labels by Hostnames (or create it using a custom report). You should use a filter to view only Event Label = "Video Plays".

This should show you how many plays you had from each site. You can use similar reports to view which video were player from each site (using Event Action).

On a final note, I do not think that the JW player is tracking 'Load' events - when the player is loaded, so you won't see if a player was loaded but no video played. You can confirm by checking if a GIF request is sent when the player is loaded.

Answer 2

I just found that there is no direct solution for my requirement using the google pro plugin.. Instead we implemented a custom solution as follows.. Created a custom Tracker which uses the google analytics APIs directly instead of "Google Analytics Pro" plugin. For that I have Utilized the JWplayer API to interact with the video player and get the video related data and it was be passed to the Google Analytics API. Later in the Google Analytics account, created a custom report with the required metrics and dimensions.. This helped me to get all the tracking details and create the required report. :) I really appreciate the support I got from Antoine which helped me to understand some basics and move towards a solution.

Answer 3

I just checked your site and found that the embed code consists of iFrame and this is the reason why you are unable to track the hostname at which the embed video gets played.As you are using iframes in the embed video code, you wont be able to track the site details were the video is embedded. You always get storybridge.tv as the site url. (iFrame do not support cross domain interaction)

To avoid this problem we have to use tag (Similar to old Youtube Embed Code) which will help the plugin to get the details of the site at which video is played.