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Hi Martin,
I’m getting in touch to see if you could help me with figuring out why, despite being set to autoplay, videos served through Flowplayer have much lower view counts than videos served through vimeo.
We usually embed videos through flowplayer.
The numbers we got on a video are:
*March 1-8, TCPL video is embedded on every news story
*New Story Pageviews: ~280,000
*Video Views (according to google analytics, linked to Flowplayer): 28.100
*Conclusion: Video views are about 1/10th of total pageviewsIn comparison, we did a test where we embedded 1 video onto 1 story only, and used Vimeo’s player and view count reporting.
The numbers were:
*News Story Pageviews: ~5,500
*Video Views, (according to Vimeo): ~1,000
*Conclusion: Video views are about 1/5th of total pageviewsAny thoughts as to what could be causing this discrepancy? I would love to just report the video views that Google Analytics is giving us for our Flowplayer videos, but it seems like those numbers might be under-reported.
Thanks,
Mike
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Hello Mike,
this is a tricky question. You are comparing two different videos. Could you please try this with the same video? You can try to swap the FV Player code to Vimeo embed player after a day and then compare number of pageloads and video plays on both days.
On our end, we could try some other views tracking to see what kind of numbers do we get.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Here’s a more macro look at the numbers we’re getting. All numbers are taken from March 1-23.
News Story Pageviews: 621,360
News Story DESKTOP Pageviews: 248,544
(38% of all sessions were on desktop, and 38% of 621,360 is 248,544)Considering the fact that we have one flowplayer video embedded on every single news story, and that all of those videos are set to autoplay on desktop, the number of total video views for that period of time should be equal to the number of desktop page views (248,544). However, the total number of events was…
Flowplayer Total Events: 84,455
It’s hard for us to understand this discrepancy. We have tested and confirmed that these videos successfully autoplay on desktop – Mac, PC, chrome, safari, IE. To see for yourself how these videos are embedded into our news stories, see this example (after the first paragraph) http://ithacavoice.com/2015/03/owner-encouraged-fate-cornell-icon-hot-truck-ithaca-meeting/
Perhaps somehow flowplayer is only counting sessions, rather than individual video views, as events. The total number of page sessions was 99,383 – much closer to the number of flowplayer events: 84,455.
Is there a way to verify this? I really am confident that I served closer to 248,544 video views via flowplayer this month, and that the reported number of 84,455 is far too low.
Thank you so much for helping me with this.
Mike
Hello Mike,
I’m setting up similar page on our website now. Then we will check if we get the same issue with video playback stats.
We will also check the count of POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php calls matching the URL of our new page as a referrer. That is something which you can try as well, if you know how to parse the access logs. You would have to divide the number of matches by two if you have any other WP admin-ajax call on that page though.
I checked this for our site and I’m getting much closer matching data.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Thank you so much for looking into this.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to check the count of POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php calls as you suggested. Is there a tutorial online you could direct me to?
Best,
Mike
Hello Mike,
you must use grep command line tool.
If you are not sure about using that, could you please send your site access logs to us? Then we can count the video plays and let you know what the number is.
That would allow us to see if there is bug in our video plays tracking.
Thanks,
Martin
Hello Mike,
new version of FV WordPress Flowplayer will send following events to Google Analytics:
* Video start
* Video first quartile
* Video second quartile
* Video third quartile
* Video completeThis should help with your video playback stats.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
That’s so great! All of those stats will be extremely useful to know.
I recently updated the FV Player Pro plugin, but didn’t see an update for the FV WordPress Flowplayer plugin yet (currently using Version 2.3.12). Are those changes you mentioned effective immediately? If so, will they show up in Event Category? I currently only see “Video / Seconds Played” in Event Categories, while looking at the google analytics reports for today and yesterday.
Thank you so much for helping me get these important stats for the videos that I serve through flowplayer.
Best,
Mike
Hello Mike,
we released FV WordPress Flowplayer 2.3.13 now, see the release notes here to learn more about improved tracking.: https://foliovision.com/2015/04/detailed-google-analytics
Thanks,
Martin
Hello Mike,
the guide of checking events for each video (how far did the playback went) is available at https://foliovision.com/player/google-analytics-flowplayer -> “How many users start to watch a video and how many of them watch the full video?”
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Wow, this is awesome! This is extremely helpful and detailed, and I’m so happy to see this new feature. I just have one more question to help me understand how to read these numbers: does the “video start” event encompass all video views? That is to say, if I were to look at a video’s stats and it said:
* Video start = 5
* Video first quartile = 4
* Video second quartile = 3
* Video third quartile = 2
* Video complete = 1Would that mean there were 5 total video views, or 15? (5+4+3+2+1)
Thanks again!
Mike
Hello Mike,
the above numbers would indicate that the video was played 5 times, but only once until the end. So only check “Video start” if you want to know how many times the video was watched.
Please not that this counts the total video plays and not unique visitors. So if a single person plays your video 100 times, “Video start” will increase by 100 and the other counters as well, if the video is always played in full length.
Thanks,
Martin
