Free IQ Player integrates Google Analytics for Video

March 10, 2008 at 5:19 pm · 556 views · Filed under portfolio, tutorial, work

As announced, the Free IQ Media Player now incorporates Google Analytics with it’s custom flash video player. Simply put, users may upload their own content (or even use anyone else’s content that is on Free IQ), embed it on their own sites and then view the tracking/logging/usage/analytics/metrics it their own Google analytics account. You don’t have to do anything- the player will do it automatically, but if you don’t have google analytics installed on your site, nothing happens. So go ahead and sign up, it’s free and very useful.

This works with both versions of Google analytics tracking code. Recently Google updated the code they give users to enhance the functionality of the analytics they give you in their reports. Some have voiced concern about whether they can update to the new code and still use the Free IQ video tracking, now the answer is yes! This new updated player works with the new Google Analytics Tracking Code! Others have voiced a concern that they aren’t ready to update the Google code on the rest of their site yet, this is not a problem either. The Free IQ Player works with either version of the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code). It would even work with both… say you had a site with some old code and some new code, the player knows and will tell Google what people are doing with this player on your site.

To see the report, go to your google analytics account, click on ‘Content’, and then ‘Top Content’. This page shows you the most viewed pages on your site. You can filter the report by typing in the box under the list of urls. Find the ‘Find Url’ box (be sure ‘containing’ is selected in the drop-down) and type ‘freeiqvideo/’. Press ‘go’ and you should see all the analytics for the Free IQ player on your site! All the analytics from the player start with ‘freeiqvideo/’ in the url path and we’ve organized all the analytics into three different types: Video, Actions and Navigation. Every time someone does any of these things on your site, google analytics will log a pageview to a certain page. This certain page changes and depends upon what the user did exactly. When a user visits your site and begins to watch a certain video called ‘My Cool Video’, google analytics logs a pageview to ‘freeiqvideo/playstart/mycoolvideo! Notice that the title of the video is incorporated into the report, this helps determine which video is more popular and such. The title of the video is the title you give Free IQ upon uploading your content and can usually also be found at http://freeiq.com/mycoolvideo

This information can be very helful as you think about which video to place or keep on your site, and even where to put it. You can also see how many times the video was finished (freeiqvideo/playcomplete/mycoolvideo). This can be very useful to help you determine if your video is too long, too boring, or on the other end very engaging- it’s essentially your video bounce rate.

Other than video tracking, the Free IQ Player also logs to google analytics actions users have with the player itself. The Free IQ Player enables users to share your content with others. There are interactions with the player for users to email a link to their friends about the content they are watching, get html codes to embed that content onto their own site, and even share the content with any of a number of social bookmarking sites! If someone were to use the Free IQ Player to link to your content through a popular del.icio.us the report would log a pageview at ‘freeiqvideo/PlayerInteraction/SharedVideo/delicious/mycoolvideo’! You will see which bookmarking service was used and what content was bookmarked! You will know what users are doing with your content!

And lastly you can see how users navigate through the embedded Free IQ Player. Inside the player, users are presented with information about the content they watch. All this information is organized into tabbed windows. Every time a user view’s this information, the player logs to google analytics a page view. These logs are independent of the content, so the url reported does not include the video Title as before. An example is a user views the author window is: /freeiqvideo/PlayerNav/WindowSelected/author.

Here is the breakdown of all the logging from the Free IQ Player to Google Analytics:
Video Tracking:
Play Started: /freeiqvideo/playstart/mycoolvideo
Play Completed: /freeiqvideo/playcomplete/mycoolvideo

Interactions:
Embed Codes Copied: /freeiqvideo/PlayerInteraction/EmbedCodesCopied/mycoolvideo
Email Sent: /freeiqvideo/PlayerInteraction/EmailSent/mycoolvideo
Bookmark: /freeiqvideo/PlayerInteraction/SharedVideo/bookmarkingService/mycoolvideo

Navigation:
Author Tab Selected: /freeiqvideo/PlayerNav/WindowSelected/author
Playlist Tab Selected: /freeiqvideo/PlayerNav/WindowSelected/playlist
IQPON Tab Selected: /freeiqvideo/PlayerNav/WindowSelected/iqpon
Share Tab Selected: /freeiqvideo/PlayerNav/WindowSelected/share
Email Tab Selected: /freeiqvideo/PlayerNav/WindowSelected/email
Embed Tab Selected: /freeiqvideo/PlayerNav/WindowSelected/embed

This is the list of current integration with Google Analytics from the Free IQ Player. If you have any questions or requests, feel free to comment here or contact Free IQ.

Tags: analytics, flash, free iq, review, tutorial, video, work

Comments

Integrate Google Analytics with Flash | Tutorial

January 28, 2008 at 6:46 pm · 6,235 views · Filed under tutorial

The results are in and the requested topic is “Integrate Google Analytics into Flash.” The poll has been reset and is ready to recieve your post requests, so keep voting! It’s located in the side bar!

Overview:

Tracking your visitors and attempting to better understand them is a large part of even having content on the web. Since the days of visitor counters displayed proudly on every site, along with dozens of animated gifs to the days when site were designed solely with efficiency and conversion in mind. There are many services that will do this for a fee and other that will do it for free. A popular free web analytics tool is provided by Google. Google Analytics is started by including JavaScript on each page the user wishes to track. This JavaScript loads larger files from the Google webserver and then sets variables with the user’s account number. This JavaScript is used to track and log page views and visitors interaction with the site. This post discusses what to do if your site includes a lot of interactive flash elements you wish to track as well. With the little Google has published related to this(New Code, Old Code), I’ve tried to fill in.
Note: This explains how to set up to track flash events as page views, which does have a drawback- it inflates your pageviews in the analytics and in turn may skew your data. Il’l beposting again soon about how to use then new event tracking, which would track flash events not as pageviews, but as events and thus not inflate the page view count.

Steps:

1. If you haven’t already, install Google Analytics on your site. (Note that your analytics tracking code must be placed on the page above the flash call(s) to _trackPageview or urchinTracker)
2. Determine which events in flash you want to track.
3. Place in the external.interface code in your actionscript at the specific event(s).
4. Watch the events get logged in you Google Analytics Reports!

Example:

Here’s a simple example, say you want to track how many times an object is clicked or dragged by a user or how many times it bounces (something that could be tracked but doesn’t necessarily have any required user interaction). In this example flash file I have a ball which bounces off the walls and users can click to drag and even throw it, press the spacebar to create more balls and toggle the gravity on and off with the arrow keys (up is weightlessness, and down is gravity). Each of these events has code to communicate with Google Analytics JavaScript and track the events. I made my own function to call the google analytics code. Do I hear “but sometimes I want to use the new version of Google analytics, and sometimes I want to use the old one…” Have no fear, this function works for either one, or even both. If you’re not using the newer code the calls to the functions in the new code (pageTracker._trackPageview()) will be ignored and vice versa, if you are using the new code, then the calls to the functions in the old code (urchinTracker()) will be ignored, since the functions are not defined. You can track virtually anything with this method. I’ve exaggerated greatly in this example- just to show the variety of different ways this can be used. You might want to make certain the things you track will be useful and relevant for you.

Here is the swf file, I’ve added a text box that will print all actions that are logged to Google Analytics

track Google Analytics actionscript function

Calls to Google Analytics actionscript function

Download:

IntegrateGoogleAnalytics.zip

Update:

Here is a screenshot of my Google Analytics Top Content after I search for “pageTracker/IntegrateGoogleAnalytics” (because I’m using the new code version, if I were using the old version I’d search for “urchin/IntegrateGoogleAnalytics”). This just shows that every event was logged to Google Analytics. This screenshot was taken mere hours after this post published.

Stay tuned for upcoming post about the new Event Tracking rather than posting each event you want to track in flash as a pageview it can be a specific event!

Tags: actionscript, analytics, as2, download, flash, interactive, javascript, open source, tutorial

Comments (7)