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Monthly Archives: July 2017

Video Engagement Tracking Analytics: Know the User Engagement rate of Your Video Channel

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Video analytics

Video Tracking Analytics

Videos have always been more effective medium of communication. Studies shows that retention rate of information is 80% for what you see and hear. For hearing it is 10 % and 20% for seeing. Better internet infrastructure has allowed online businesses to use videos as part of the content strategy. According to KPCB1 study, online video will account for 74% of online traffic by end of 2017.

Around 50% of internet users look for product related videos before visiting store2. In education content distribution industry, companies like coursera, udacity have been successful in terms of creating, publishing and tracking such videos for engaging their viewers.

Is Your Video Tracking Exhaustive?

Videos are helpful in increasing user engagement and retention. We should have efficient event tracking in place to measure video consumption metrics. For text or image content, marketers have been measuring user interactions like pageviews, clicks or hover events. For videos, it is not enough to track how many times video was being played. For getting true engagement insights, interactions like play, pause, seek should be tracked. Some of the important metrics for tracking videos on websites are video watch time, total play count, etc.

Use custom dimensions to track Video category, language, genre, total video duration, release date, etc.

user engagement with video

Having category, language, total duration as custom dimensions helps in creating custom reports. Comparing user engagement on webpages with and without videos gives useful insights. It helps in deciding video positions on the webpage.

Drawing Actionable Insights

Tracking events on 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% of video help us understand consumption and drop-off rates. We can then decide Ads placement or Click To Action buttons placement accordingly. For example, let’s say we find out that, people leave the website or play another video on 95% completion of movie. This is likely to happen as last 5% content may show movie credits. Then it makes sense to show ads or ‘Click-to-Action’ links much earlier.

There are many analytics tools which help businesses measure user interactions for videos. With over a billion users, YouTube Analytics solution is most popular in the industry. It allows us to track user interactions like total video play, pause,etc. events.

Track Much More Than Basic Events

Most of the analytics tools in the industry track video events like play, pause, seek, clicks on ads, etc. This is where effective measurement plan comes into picture. Considering the business requirements, Tatvic team has developed a solution for video tracking.

Features of Video Analytics Tool by Tatvic
  • Actual video watch time:

    When user is watching a video, user may pause a video for some time or does some other work and then again resumes play. Or, video is being played on the webpage but user is browsing some other websites in another tab. In such scenarios, metrics like video play count, watch duration will give misleading picture. Tatvic team identified this possible problem. We developed a solution for calculating actual watch duration. It considers special cases like tab switch, pause, screen size.

  • PWA Implementation:

    Progressive Web Apps are gaining popularity with better performance. Online traffic consumption across mobile has grown significantly over last few years. Tatvic team has implemented Video tracking solution for PWA websites as well.

  • Personalized Recommendations of video content:

    ‘Recommended videos’ feature played a major role in success of YouTube.  Similar is the case with Facebook videos. 500 million people are watching videos on Facebook every day3. Tatvic Data Science team has developed a Recommendation Engine. It uses machine learning algorithms to suggest recommended videos.

  • Video Players covered:

    YouTube, HTML5, Kaltura, JW Player etc.

What’s Next:

Since survey reports4 show that 11% of the global internet population is blocking ads on the web, if you are showing ads in videos then tracking the number of users with AdBlocker tools is imperative. Tatvic has also developed a solution for detecting Ad Blocker scripts which is a universe in itself and we shall be covering it in a separate blog post.

“If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It”

We hope the blog proved to be insightful to you and helped you in understanding the value of having video tracking for your website/app in place. If you have any doubts or are looking for clarifications, please drop in comments and we shall be sure to get back to you.

How to Implement Google Tag Manager in iOS Swift - Part 2 of 2

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iOS with Swift

In the previous blog post, we saw how to create a GTM container, configure a tag and publish it. In this post, we are going to tackle the specifics of creating an iOS app and integrating it with GTM.

We won’t get into the details of how to create an iOS project in Xcode.Although if you have any queries or you’re facing a difficulty in doing so, please write to us and we’ll be able to help you out. Moving on, let us check out how to integrate Google Tag Manager pod in your project.

Adding GTM to Xcode Project

Close Xcode project, open terminal, navigate to your root directory of your project and write below command. This will create a podfile in your project.

Google Tag Manager

Open podfile and include Google Tag Manager pod in it.

iOS with Swift

Close podfile, and in terminal write below command to install the pod in your project.

mplement google tag manager in iOS

Great! Google Tag Manager is installed in your project. Now open your project in Xcode using xcworkspace file.

Adding a Bridging Header File

Create a bridging header file in your project. In Xcode, go to File -> New -> File, select Header File and create it within your target to keep it associated with your project files.

tag manager for iOS apps

Open the file in editor and import below mentioned headers in it.

app analytics

Add Objective-C bridging header to Build Settings. Go to Build Settings, select All and Combined and search for the bridging header. In the value field of key containing Objective-C Bridging Header, enter header filename Bridging-Header.h.

app analytics

Adding a Default GTM Container

Go to the directory where you downloaded GTM container, drag downloaded container and drop it into your Xcode project. One window will pop up, select ‘copy items if needed’ checkbox and add container to your project’s main target.

Google Tag Manager

Initializing GTM in Xcode Project

Open AppDelegate file and following changes in it.

Confirm to TAGContainerOpenerNotifier protocol.

iOS with Swift

Implement containerAvailable method.

iOS with Swift

In didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method, add below code.

implement google tag manager in iOS

GTM is initialized in your app now. Let’s fire a screen view datalayer.

Tracking a Screen Open Event

Go to your main screen’s view controller file, from viewDidAppear method fire a dataLayer to push a screen view as shown below.

tag manager for iOS apps

Viewing The Logs in Debug Area

In Xcode, go to Product -> Run to build and run your project. Once the build runs on iOS device or simulator, you will see openScreen event being pushed in Debug Area as shown below.

app analytics

Best Practices for Flawless Tracking
  • Create one constant for UA ID in GTM and use it as tracking ID for all Universal Analytics Tags instead of hardcoding UA ID value in each Tag.
  • It is best to push a screen view when screen actually appears to user hence push a screen view datalayer from viewDidAppear method.
  • Google Analytics is case sensitive. If any letter case changes while pushing values to datalayer, Google Analytics will consider it as a different value and in reports it will appear in a different row. So it is best to keep all values in any pre-defined cases and use those same to push into datalayer every time.
Concluding Thoughts

Installing GTM library in Xcode project and initializing it with adding a default container is all you need to ensure track screen views, events and other tracking available through GTM. While adding a GTM pod in Xcode project, it is preferred to add a library of version  ‘3.15.0’ to utilize datalayer functionality. If you have made any changes in the container, published it through GTM dashboard, then those changes will be reflected in the app within 12 hours of publishing that new container. It is not mandatory to include a container in app every time you publish a new version of it through GTM dashboard.

If you have any queries, comments or feedback for the post, please leave us a comment in the section below. Our team shall be sure to get back to you.

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