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
March 3, 2008 at 6:43 pm · 466 views · Filed under portfolio, work
Here’s a post from the Free IQ Team!
We’ve been busy at Free IQ and just released our new video player!
Check it out by watching Brad Fallon on the vision of Free IQ.
Or see circlecube at Free IQ!
At the surface, the player looks much the same, but as you dig into the secondary functions, you’ll see a slew of enhancements made with you and all freeiq-ers in mind.
The layout has been updated to be more dynamic, more readable and web 2.0 friendly. The graphics got a make-over.
The updates to the playlist have cleaned up the interface and give helpful information about the content. We still get the ReviewRank for each item, and also we can see our personal viewing history, a feature we’re calling the ‘high water mark’. You can see how far into a video you’ve been. This high water mark is also shown in the scrub bar, for returning to where you left off quickly, just click the yellow arrow to return. Also the video currently being played in the player is specified as ‘Now Watching’ (how original).
The author window still displays the author’s portrait, biography and links to the author page. The author biography may contain html- such as links, which help viewers learn more about authors.
The IQPON window connects viewers to providers by giving users access to the content provider’s services!
Sharing options have been improved greatly!
Users may embed content on their own site directly from the player now! By choosing options for auto play and format user’s copy embed codes straight from the player, and paste it into their own site. The normal format uses javascript to ensure maximum compatibility with different browsing software, and the the extra simple format is for embedding content into sites which restrict javascript, such as MySpace and a handful of others, so there is always a way to embed content into your very own space.
Sharing by email is much faster now, as you can send to multiple people at once directly through the player itself (just separate the email addresses with a comma).
Sharing with the web is just as easy! You can copy the link or click your preferred social bookmarking site. Social bookmarking capabilities are built into the player, so with one click you can bookmark content to any of a number of social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, digg, furl, google bookmarks, magnolia, reddit, stumble upon, technorati, windows live favorites and yahoo! bookmarks) with more to come.
All these methods are used to share content and are useful no matter where the player is embedded!
This player release features updates to the Full Screen mode as well. To take full advantage of the screen size we stretched the control across the bottom of the screen! The control tray will slide away after a few seconds giving access to full screen video playback. To bring the controls back, just more the mouse again.
Volume controls are updated for faster more intuitive interactive control.
By using the internal menu (just right-click to access it) you have access to all options in the player.
Also updated with this release is the integration with Google Analytics! There is new tracking built into the player and best news of all is that the player now supports both versions of the Google Analytics Tracking Code. So whether you’ve updated to the new tracking system or still use the Legacy code, this player logs interactions with the player to your google analytics reports! It will tell you how much people are watching your videos, which ones and how users interact with the player on your site. We’ll post about that later, once you’ve gotten used to your new player!
Another point to mention… if you’re a Free IQ regular and have already embedded content onto your site, the updates are automatic. You have nothing to do to enable these updates! It’s already done!
Enjoy the updates, we put a lot into it!
Let us know any suggestions you have for making the Free IQ video player even better - for you!
Tags:
actionscript,
as2,
flash,
free iq,
interactive,
video,
work
February 6, 2008 at 7:30 pm · 433 views · Filed under portfolio
Brad Fallon had me make a Logo for his new site, The Free Line Report.
About the Free Line:
The Free Line is based on the concept of “Moving the Free Line” — the idea that you can grow your business, faster and more effectively, by giving away more.
Today is the age of short attention spans where interruption ads bombard us every waking minute. If you want to get more new customers, you’re better off figuring out how to give more — a lot more — first.
About the Free Line Report:
The Free Line Report is a short video podcast about internet marketing, online video, Web 2.0, and e-business.
With less than two minutes per day, you can keep up with the latest news you can use.
Tags:
free iq,
graphic design,
illustrator,
logo,
work
October 24, 2007 at 9:37 am · 137 views · Filed under work
The video player at Free IQ now supports Google Analytics and remembers your history!
We’ve just released a few new features for the flash player. For the user, we’ve added a “high water” mark showing furthest point in the video you’ve watched. For the web-site owner who embeds a FreeIQ video player on their sites, we’re now integrated with Google Analytics to help you understand how users are engaging with your video. Read on…
For the User
Say you start a video one Saturday afternoon and don’t get to watch all of it, or you’re watching a video and you rewind because you missed a bit of content. The high water mark helps you know where in the video you left off.
The image below shows a player where the user has watched up to about 3 minutes, but rewound to minute 1. The green vertical bar in the timeline helps the viewer return to finish watching the video.
For the Hoster
If you embed a FreeIQ video player and use the free Google Analtyics solution, we’ll log entries to your analytics telling you how many folks start watching the video, completed watching the video, click through to your author page, etc.
Here’s the full table of events you’ll see in your analytics stream:
| Log Entry |
User Action |
|
/freeiqvideo/playstart/(video name) |
start the video |
| /freeiqvideo/playcomplete/(video name) |
finish the video |
| /freeiqvideo/authorinfo/(authorHomepage) |
view author tab |
| /freeiqvideo/outgoing/freeiqauthorpage/(authorHomepage) |
click through to author homepage |
| /freeiqvideo/outgoing/freeiqiqpon/(authorHomepage)/(iqponPage) |
click through to iqpon |
|
/freeiqvideo/email/(video name) |
send a share email |
|
/freeiqvideo/embed/(video name) |
get embed codes |
You can opt out of this by sending the parameter “useGoogleAnalytics” as false in the embed code, and of course, if you don’t use Google Analytics, nothing undesirable will happen. If you use Google Analytics on your site, this will automatically appear in your reports. If you don’t, you may want to consider adding Google Analytics to your site, at which point, these will begin appearing in your reports.
So, to our users, happy viewing. To our web-site owners, dedicated stats on viewership of video on your site is yet another reason to use FreeIQ.
Read the full article at: the FreeIQTeam blog
Tags:
actionscript,
as2,
flash,
free iq,
video,
work
October 1, 2007 at 12:39 pm · 188 views · Filed under portfolio, work
Introducing our new Free IQ player! It’s got lots of new bells and whistles, and is the first player on the internet to directly incorporate e-commerce.
Let us take you through the tour of:
- Our new “scrub bar”
- Volume controls
- The playlist
- Full screen mode
- Author information
- IQpons
The term “scrub bar” refers to widgetry for moving back and forth in the video. Pictured in the middle of the bottom control bar, it shows you the elapsed time out of the total and the amount of the video loaded. Skip forward or back within the loaded area by simply clicking on the bar or even “scrub” through the video by dragging the handle.
Click the volume icon for interactive volume settings and a mute button inside the video panel.
Full screen is one of our most exciting features! Get ready for Free IQ immersion!
The text in the middle of the screen tells you that you can press ESC to exit full screen. The player control at the bottom disappears after a few seconds and re-appears when click on the screen.
Select among related content with the playlist. Note the presence of our estimation of the quality of the content through your input, ReviewRank.
Click the graphic of a person to access the author panel and learn more about this content’s author and jump to his homepage at Free IQ.
With the IQPon, you can hire a Free IQ author for direct consultation! Anyone can create an IQpon product at Free IQ, so put your expertise to work today.
For authors who are not offering consulting services, this button is replaced with Share — the broadcast icon on the far right of the control bar.
From Share, you can get code to put the video on your page, or mail to a friend. This is available in the tabbed widget from Author Info or Playlist as well.
Thanks to Andy Beard for the his writeup of Free IQ today. His core complaint about our player, an inability to get to the product page, is now resolved. You can reach the authors homepage from within the Author Info tab, or the homepage of the currently playing video from the FreeIQ logo on the control bar.
What This Means To You
These improvements have advantages for you, no matter how you use FreeIQ:
As a user - you get an improved user experience, with more viewing options and the ability to easily find out more information on the author or the subject.
As an affiliate - you get more sales, because viewers are more likely to click through to content, the author’s site, or FreeIQ in general. Plus, with ecommerce enabled in the player itself, you’re more likely to get a sale!
As a content provider - users are more likely to watch your video all the way through and to click to your site. Plus, full screen mode makes it so that screen-capture-type videos are more readable, so the learning experience you provide is enhanced.
We think you’ll find this new viewer to be a very cool step forward. We’d like to hear your reactions too by adding a comment below! Try it out with one of the links below:
Stay tuned!
Visit the Free IQ Team blog to read more at freeiqteam.com!
Tags:
actionscript,
as2,
flash,
free iq,
graphic design,
interactive,
video,
website,
work
June 25, 2007 at 7:48 pm · 79 views · Filed under portfolio
Starting my new position at Free IQ this week! I’ll be doing Web Design, Flash Design/Development and anything between. Actionscript, Flash, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Graphic Design etc…
I’ve been hired expressly to revamp the flash video player they have. They assure me that there will be a plethora of interesting tasks to keep me busy as well. I’ll post significant updates as the player gets massaged and fleshed out!
Tags:
flash,
free iq,
web design,
work
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