There’s such a buzz around data these days. Data is everywhere. It is the new oil. But how do you use it to actually meet your business objectives? For video creators, the question becomes: How to use data to improve viewer experience and to reach out to new customers?

Our aim for our video analytics solution is to enable our users to get actionable insights about their viewers. The video analytics interface would provide insights into how viewers are experiencing videos. We hope that this would help you understand your viewers better, and power you to make smarter data-driven decisions about your video content.

Any kind of analytics is useful only when it answers a business problem. Data as thing-in-itself has little value. Our analytics’ utility is in helping you improve your video content and customer outreach. With that in mind, we take you through some ways that video analytics can help you achieve your business objectives.

Learn how users interact with your videos

Do viewers watch the entire video? Do your viewers watch your videos multiple times? What are the sections in your videos that viewers have to watch multiple times?

With Video Loads metric, you get the number of times that users have visited a page containing a video. With Total Covered metric, you get the total unique seconds of videos that users have watched.

If a user has watched a 2 minute video 3 times, the total covered metric is still 2 minutes, while the Total Played metric is 2*3 = 6 minutes. As you can see for yourself, dividing Total Played by Total Covered gives you a rough understanding of how often users watch a particular video. When you are providing educational content, such metrics provide valuable insights on whether users are finding a concept difficult to understand. Using VdoCipher’s custom overlay features you can then add links or other helpful texts to make it easier for users to understand the concepts.

Another use case for our customers is to block users from sharing their accounts. While any measure to prevent password sharing has to be implemented directly to your website, we provide sample codes that users can implement in their frontend to track video watched time.

Learn where your users are coming in from

What countries/ cities your viewers are watching your videos in?

Another plain vanilla metric that can be enormously profitable. If fewer viewers are watching from Europe than they should be, maybe it is time for you to raise your Google AdWords spend in Europe. If your videos are being loaded in Sweden, but then abandoned, maybe its a good idea to add Swedish subtitles.

Find out which are your most popular videos

This would give you actionable insights on how to improve user interaction. Maybe its the thumbnail. Maybe its the video description. Maybe the link. A/B test like crazy and find the combination that drives the most views for your videos.

Keep track of your daily bandwidth usage

Your overall bandwidth usage is available in the VdoCipher dashboard itself. You can keep track of your total expenses by checking out bandwidth usage, going back to the last 20 days.

And now we zoom-in to take a closer look into the VdoCipher analytics.

Guide to Video Analytics

Analytics tab in Dashboard

You can access the daily bandwidth usage in the analytics section of the VdoCipher dashboard.

Detailed Reports (ThePlayer.io Interface)

Clicking on the Detailed Reports button would take you ThePlayer.io interface. This interface would provide a more detailed understanding of how your users watch your videos.

On the top you get the option to select different views – Overview, Realtime and Per Video analytics. You can also set the time period over which to examine your data, ranging from last day to 6 months back.

Top Left corner – View selector

Three views –

• Overview – Get account level analytics for all your videos
• RealTime – Get real time data of where your users are watching your videos from (nicely laid out on Google Map), and anonymized details on how users are experiencing the video
• Videos – Get video level analytics about video play rates

Top Right – Filter – Time Period

Time period over which the data is displayed.

Overview

Top left (under the view selector) – Toggle Switch between Views and Loads

This switch toggles between user views and player loads
Player Load happens every time a webpage containing the embedded video is loaded.
User view is counted only when the user actually watches the video.

Overview – Loads

1st row

• Total Loads –
• Total Unique Viewers –
• Total seconds played –
• Total Unique Videos (viewed)

2nd row (Charts) player loads grouped by user info

• City viewed in
• Browsers
• OS and device
• Last State – This analytic can give you insights over how your users are interacting with your content.
  • Ready – video was loaded but not played
  • Paused – User paused the video after playing and then exited
  • Ended – User watched the video to the end and then exited
  • Playing – user closed the browser session while the video was playing

 

3rd row – Graph of Total Covered vs Total Played over Time Period

Total covered – how any seconds of your video library users have watched in the given period.

So if you have a total of 200 videos, and viewers have in the last week only watched your latest 7 videos in full, then the Total covered will be the aggregate length of the 7 videos. Videos that are watched multiple times are only added one single time in total covered metric.

Total Played is the total number of seconds of your video that users have watched. Each new session adds to the total count.

Totally Played is more than Total Covered. The difference would give you an understanding as to whether users have seen your videos multiple times.

4th row – Graph of Total Load Count over Time Period

Total Load Count gives you number of times the video player is loaded

5th row

Left side – Top cities that videos are loaded

Right side – Most popular videos by videos loaded

Subview – Overview – Views

1st row

• Total Views –
• Total Unique Viewers –
• Total seconds played –
• Total Unique Videos (viewed)

2nd row (Charts) videos viewed grouped by user info

• City viewed in
• Browsers
• OS and device
• Last State – This analytic can give you insights over how your users are interacting with your content.
  • Paused – User paused the video after playing and then exited
  • Ended – User watched the video to the end and then exited
  • Playing – user closed the browser session while the video was playing

3rd row – Graph of Total Covered vs Total Played over Time Period (this graph is the same across both sub-views)

Total covered – how any seconds of your video library users have watched in the given period.

So if you have a total of 200 videos, and viewers have in the last week only watched your latest 7 videos in full, then the Total covered will be the aggregate length of the 7 videos. Videos that have been watched multiple times are only added one time.

Total played is the total number of seconds of your video that users have watched. Each new session adds to the total count.

Totally Played is more than Total Covered. The difference gives you an understanding as to whether users have seen your videos multiple times.

4th row – Graph of Total Views over Time Period

Total View Count gives you number of times a video is watched

5th row

Left side – Top cities that videos are viewed in  

Right side – Top popular videos by videos viewed

RealTime View

This map-based graph shows how viewers watch your videos across the globe

The real-time map shows how many users are watching your videos across the globe in real-time, and shoes viewer heatmaps througout the playback session, upto a period of two hours.

Videos View

On selecting the videos view you can get detailed per video analytics. You can search for all of your videos on this page.

Analytics for Individual videos are similar to Analytics for all videos in the Overview view.

Disclaimer: Please note that the Analytics Dashboard is currently in Beta mode. Our aim is to help provide insights for you to better target your video content for your viewers. The analytics dashboard may not be able to track 100% of user sessions because of reasons such as Javacript disabling, Network failure, Do not track enabled, Caching issues and using Older player versions.

Find more details about VdoCipher’s DRM infrastructure and our integration of Widevine DRM for Hollywood-grade security.