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Google Analytics Event Tracking is a flexible solution for measuring user interaction with your website - including videos. I have demonstrated this before with my YouTube Chromeless Player with Google Analytics Event Tracking (you can download the player from that article).
Since Event Tracking isn't made especially for video analytics, it can be a little bit difficult to understand what the data means as the image to the right illustrates (click for larger image).
To make the video analytics data more understandable I have made an Excel 2007 spreadsheet that is connected directly to Google Analytics using the Google Analytics API.
Different Video reports
The Excel spreadsheet contains 3 different reports.
Video Dashboard
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The dashboard contains an overview of your video data from the selected month and includes video KPI's for 3 different Stakeholder levels (levels borrowed from Eric T. Petersons Big Book of KPIs).
- Senior strategists
- Mid-tier strategists
- Tactical resources
The dashboard shows information about this month compared to last month, and this month compared to the same month last year plus a graph showing trends for the last 12 months.
The dashboard and the calculations are a rewritten version of Web Analytics Dashboard fun by Stéphane Hamel.
Video KPIs are inspired from Online Video Analytics - KPIs written by Dennis Mortensen.
Videos
This sheet contains information about which videos that have been watched the month you have chosen in the month field on the dashboard. The report contains the following information:
- Video views (Videos that have been started)
- Completed videos
- Percent completed videos
- Visits
- Video length (If none of the visitors have completed the video the selected month this report will be blank)
- Average time viewed
- Percent of video viewed on average
- Total time viewed the selected month
- Conversion Rate (E-commerce Conversion Rate)
- Number of Conversions
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Single Video Analytics
This report shows a day to day report for the selected month, and contains the same information as the "Videos" report, but for the single video selected. The graph shows information about views, completed views, visits and e-commerce conversions.
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Getting started
The Excel spreadsheet is adapted to my custom YouTube player, so if you are using this player you should be able to use the Excel spreadsheet as it is. If not you will have to modify the Excel spreadsheet to your needs.
Requirements
You will need Excel 2007. It will unfortunately not work in older versions of Excel or on Mac. Sorry.
Quick start
- Download the zipped Excel 2007 spreadsheet and unzip it.
- Open the Excel file and activate macros.
- In the field "Month" on the Dashboard, choose what should be the last month in the report.
- Go to the Settings sheet, and change "Sites" from YourWebsiteName to your site name.
- On the same line as your site name, insert your Google Analytics ID number. This is not your UA-XXXX-X ID, it's the ID in the Google Analytics URL (ex. https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/dashboard?id=123456)
- Insert your Google Analytics username (email) and password in the Settings sheet.
- Get yourself a cup of coffee (too many calculations going on in Excel) and wait for the result.
Since all the calculations can make Excel slow it can be wise to change Calculation Options from Automatic to Manual. You find this setting under the Formulas menu. Then if you need to update your sheet, hit Shift + F9 if you only want to calculate the sheet you are on, or F9 if you want to calculate your entire workbook.
More information of the sheets in the Workbook
Dashboard
The KPIs on the Dashboard are flexible, which means that the same calculations can be reused for different KPIs. Each stakeholder can have up to 4 KPIs.
Settings
You will also find a table on this sheet with the columns EventCategory and EventAction. If you are using different category and action namings than me you will have to change this.
Naming of Stakeholders are also done on this sheet. The numbers in the Num. column is used to attach the different KPIs to the different stakeholders.
Segment1
All the monthly data are reported here. You shouldn't normally touch these data unless you want other data reported or calculated.
Lookup
All the calculation of average values and standard deviation is done on this sheet. If you add or changes column titles on the Segment1 sheet you must also add the same columns to this sheet (use the same column title). Except from that you shouldn't normally have to change anything on this sheet.
KPIs
On this sheet you can edit the KPI names and description. Column KPI1 will match Stakeholder 1 on the Settings sheet.
KPI names must match headings used in the Segment1 sheet and the Lookup sheet.
GA Metrics and Dimensions
On this sheet you find all Google Analytics Metrics and Dimensions available with explanations.
How Excel is fetching data from Google Analytics
Excel is fetching the data from the Google Analytics API using VBA coding. These codes are written by Mikael Thuneberg, and he has explained on his blog how to use the codes. You will also find other Excel examples there.
Some final words about this Excel Video Analytics spreadsheet
Everything about this Excel Video Analytics spreadsheet isn't explained in this article - it's just too much to explain. Therefor
and then make yourself familiar with the spreadsheet and try to understand how things work.
I'm using Excel Tables, Arrays and Name(ing of ceels) heavily in the spreadsheet, so these are some things that should try to understand how works.
And since an article about Video Analytics isn't complete without a video, below is a video where the developers from Google explains the Google Analytics API.
Happy Playing and Analyzing.
If you make any improvements to the Excel video sheet I would love to hear about it.
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