#playerjs

We're excited to share our latest product to help you build a more engaging site: Embedly Analytics.  For this release, we teamed up with Reddit to take a look at how videos are watched on their site. See some of the fun insights we uncovered on the Reddit blog.

This post will give you a quick intro on our analytics tools.

When you post a YouTube video on your site, you really don't know how many people actually hit play and how far they watch.

With Embedly Analytics, you can now see these stats.  Analytics are measured for any of the supported providers, including Vine, SoundCloud, Instagram, and Vimeo when the embed is served from the Embedly API.  

After logging in, an in-embed overlay appears over posted embeds on your site.  Click it to see the Embedly Analytics. 

Here you can find the realtime and weekly stats for the embed.  The stats take into account the funnel of visits (when the page loads), hovers, and plays.  The weekly stats helps identify recent bursts. Hover over the graph to see the specific funnel stats over time.

Furthermore, see the distribution of views over the timeline of the video on the heatmap.  This is fairly powerful in seeing what people are actually watching.  Perhaps no one makes it to the funny moment 25 seconds in, and miss the point of the post. You should highlight to start there. Maybe you notice a burst of activity in the middle- that could be the perfect gif opportunity. 

You can pull up the dashboard view from there, or see it in App.  This gives you an overview of all of your embedded media analytics. You can use this to find out which videos are played most of the way through, and which ones are abandoned immediately.

It's not just about finding your most popular posts- it's finding out what is most engaging.  The same embed posted on different pages can have different results based on the target audience.  If a video has a low play count, people are not enticed to actually click play- find a better title.  If people abandon the video immediately, then it isn't actually delivering anything substantial. Perhaps it will be more successful with a different audience. Explore these relationships with the funnel and duration analytics for embedded media. 

Embedly Analytics are powerful on popular media sites, and sites with lots of user generated content. If your site has a custom video player, Embedly can measure these analytics if there is an API for the media player following the playerjs spec.  You can get in touch with us about this as well.