Do you have video or audio content on your website or in your app? If you answered this with yes, you should continue reading and learn everything about our Media Analytics premium feature.
When you produce video or audio content, you are either spending money or time or often both money and time on your content in the hope of increasing conversions or sales. This means you have to know how your media is being used, when it is used, for how long and by whom. You can simply not afford not to know how this content affects your overall business goals as you are likely losing money and time by not making the most out of it. Would you be able to answer any of the above questions? Do you know whether you can justify the cost and time for producing them, which videos work better than others and how they support your marketing strategy? Luckily, getting all these insights is now so trivial it is almost a crime to not measure it.
Getting Media Analytics and Installation
Media Analytics can be purchased from the Matomo (Piwik) Marketplace where you find all sorts of free plugins as well as several premium features such as A/B Testing or Funnel. After the purchase you will receive a license key that you can enter in your Matomo to install and update the plugin with just one click.
The feature will in most cases automatically start tracking your media content and you don’t even need to change the tracking code on your website. Currently supported players are for example YouTube, Vimeo, HTML 5, JW Player, VideoJS and many more players. You can also easily extend it by adding a custom media player or simply by letting us know which player you use and we will add support for it for you.
By activating this feature, you get more than 15 new media reports, even more exportable widgets, new segments, APIs, and more. We will cover some of those features in this blog post and in part 2. For a full list of features check out the Media Analytics page on the Matomo Marketplace.
Media Overview
As the name says, it gives you an overview over your media usage and how it performs over time. You can choose any media metrics in the big evolution graph and the sparklines below give you an overview over all important metrics in a glance.
It lets you for example see how often media was shown to your users, how often users start playing your media, for how long they watched it, how often they finished it, and more. If you see some spikes there, you should definitely have a deeper look at the other reports. When you hover a metric, it will show you a tooltip explaining how the data for this is collected and what it means.
Real-Time Media
On the Real-Time page you can see how your content is being used by your visitors right now, for example within the last 30 minutes, last 60 minutes and last 24 hours.
It shows you how many plays you had in the last minutes, for how long they played it, and it shows you currently most popular media titles. This is great to discover which media content performs best right now and lets you make decisions based on user behaviour that is happening right now.
Below you can see our Audience Real-Time Map that shows you from where in the world your media is being played. A bigger circle indicates that a media play happened more recently and of course you can zoom in down to countries and regions.
All the reports update every few seconds so you can always have a look at it and see in just a second how your content is doing and how certain marketing campaigns affect it. All these real-time reports can be also added as widgets to any of your Matomo Dashboards and they can be exported for example as an iframe.
Video, Audio and Media Player reports
Those reports come with so many features, we need a separate blog post and cover this in part 2.
Events
Media Analytics will automatically track events so you can see how often users pressed for example play or pause, how often they resumed a video and how often they finished a video. This helps you better understand how your media is being used.
For example in the past we noticed a couple of videos with lots of pause and resume events. We then had a look at the Audience Log – which we will cover next – to better understand why visitors paused the videos so often. We then realized they did this especially for videos that were served from a specific server and because the videos were loading so slow, users often pressed pause to let the media buffer, then played the media for a few seconds and then paused it again as they had to wait for the video to load. Moving those videos to another, faster server showed us immediate results in the number of pauses going down and on average visitors watched the videos for much longer.
Audience Log
At InnoCraft, we understand that not only aggregated metrics matter but also that you often need the ability to dig into your data and “debug” certain behaviours to understand the cause for some unusual high or low metrics. For example you may find out that many of your users often pause a video, then you wonder how each individual user behaved so you can better understand the why.
The audience log shows you a detailed log of every visitor. You can chronologically see every action a visitor has performed during their whole visit. If you click on the visitor profile link, you can even see all visits of a specific visitor, and all actions they have ever performed on your website.
This lets you ultimately debug and understand your visitors and see exactly which actions they performed before playing your media, which media they played, how they played your media, and how they behaved after playing your media.
The visitor log of course also shows important information about each visitor like where they came from (referrer), their location, software, device and much more information.
Audience Map
The Audience Map is similar to the Real-Time Map but it shows you the locations of your visitors based on a selected date range and not in real time. The darker the blue, the more visitors from that country, region or city have interacted with your media.
Coming in part 2
In the next part we will cover which video, audio and media player reports Media Analytics provides, how segmenting gives you insights into different personas, and how nicely it integrates into Matomo.
How to get Media Analytics and related features
You can get Media Analytics on the Matomo Marketplace. If you want to learn more about this feature, you might be also interested in the Media Analytics User Guide and the Media Analytics FAQ.
