If your organization is putting time and effort into video production, you may want to measure users' engagement with those videos.
In addition to using Google Analytics Event Tracking for video interactions, you could work with your developers to capture things like video watch time and video starts as custom metrics. This would then allow you to create calculated metrics like:
- Video watch time / Video View,
- Video watch time / Session
- Video watch time / User
- Video watch time / Session Duration, in other words, the percentage of session duration that consists of video watch time.
Using custom reports, you could then display these metrics against dimensions like the name or the URL of the video, which could be captured as an event label or as a custom dimension.
If your videos are hosted on YouTube, your developers can use the YouTube Player API or the YouTube Trigger in Google Tag Manager to track these interactions as events.
You can get pretty creative with this.
For example, if pauses are greater than three, this could be one delayed watcher. If a user hits play and then fires no events until the end, this could be one perfect play.
If the user watches between minute two and minute three of your video -- in other words, the spot where you know you have a call to action -- this could be one CTA impression.
Then, you could use these events in segments to be able to slice and dice your data for further analysis. For example, you could compare your segments for delayed watchers versus perfect plays to see if watching video in different ways has an impact on the overall key event rate for your site.
