One of the great features of COVE is the ability to track local content usage in your video portal, on your mobile portal and via player embeds (a.k.a the Partner Player). With Google Analytics (GA) integrated at the page view and video view level, it is easy to see how your local content is performing.
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Click to see an example from WPT. |
The benefit to making this update is getting a clearer, more complete view of the most popular video content for YOUR users. This will help you make better decisions when it comes to content promotion, strategy and engagement.
Continue on for the how-to!
Follow these steps to extend your video metrics:
- Login into your COVE admin
- Go to Destinations>>COVE Video Portal and click through to your site
- On the “Home” row, go into “Page Metadata”
- Add your Google Analytics profile ID to the “GA event tracking” field
- Save
It takes about a day, but you will begin to see new metrics show up in your GA account for national content.
To find the metrics in GA, first go to Content>>Events>>Overview. Then, on the main screen select Event Action, and then click MediaStart. Finally, add Event Label as a Secondary Dimension on the next screen. You can add filters to further sort the results. Note: this is only one way to navigate to the results; there are surely others!
Hopefully this helps you round out your daily/monthly/quarterly reports!
I know I had sent some email to both Max and Marla regarding Google analytics and its tracking on mobile devices...will this little trick help us get that missing data?
ReplyDeleteIf you filter in Google Analytics based on the Event Category, you will see a one for mobile.
ReplyDeleteSo I've go through the info about setting up this Event tracking, but I don't get anything resembling "MediaStart" when click on the event action.
ReplyDeleteIn the event categories, what is the "Mobile Partner Player" tracking? Is it the partner player (videos embeded in our web pages) that are viewed through mobile browsers?
ReplyDeleteDoes the "Mobile Web Portal" category track only videos from the Mobile Portal site?
Where are App videos tracked?
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteYou are correct.
Mobile Web Partner Player is the Event Category for video views that occur through a mobile device browser in a Partner Player you've embedded on a site.
The Mobile Web Portal category tracks the video views that occur through a mobile device browser in your local COVE portal.
The video events for the PBS iPhone and iPad apps are not getting reported in to producer or station accounts just yet. Its been a major priority we've been working on for a long time and we are very, very close to finally being able to offer it to you.
Also, please remember the COVE Partner Player is different from the COVE Viral Player. The Partner Player is the iFrame code that COVE publishers have access to through the COVE Admin when they publish a video. The Viral player is the object code available to the public through the button in the video player controls. They are 2 different video players with 2 different use-cases. The Partner Player is intended to ONLY be used on PBS and local-station sites because it lacks the branding/context that is displayed in the Viral Player. The Viral Player has branding and html links (FANTASTIC for SEO link-building) so it is what should be used on sites outside of PBS.org and your local station site. If you follow this best-practice and keep things separated you can use the Viral Player and Partner Player event categories as a proxy for the number of video views that occurred on your site (Partner Player) and off your site (Viral Player).
Hope that helps!
-Dan Haggerty