How to Use Google Analytics for Your Video Platform
Both marketers and video producers are expected to demonstrate a return on investment from their videos. But how do you actually measure the quality of a video and its content value for a business?
Kavimo integrates with Google Analytics to bring all the metrics you need to measure video engagement within your marketing strategy into one place. When you embed a video from Kavimo on your website, playback data is automatically sent to your Google Analytics account and Tag Manager as an event. This lets you monitor video performance in full — you can easily see how many times each video was viewed, along with the number of plays and more, all within your Google Analytics account.
To make the analysis and reporting process even easier, we've put together a set of free Google Analytics tools that users can access with just a few clicks.
Custom Dashboard for Video Tracking
To help our customers get the most out of the integration, we've prepared several ready-made templates that you can activate simply by clicking the link below and following the instructions (you'll need to be signed into Google Analytics with admin-level access to do this).
Link: The Magic Google Analytics Dashboard!
Here's what you'll see — and you can add many more charts and graphs based on the metrics most relevant to your work.
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This dashboard displays various events for all video playbacks and conversion data, presenting the information in a way that mirrors the functionality of the Kavimo analytics dashboard. The charts you receive by default are:
- Views: This chart separately shows the raw number of views (unique events) as well as the number of site sessions that included one or more views (sessions with events);
- Turnstile submissions: Like the previous chart, this shows the raw number of events and the number of sessions that included an event;
- Top played videos: A list of videos that received the most views within a specified time range;
- Top videos by number of leads generated: A list of videos that generated the most leads within a specified time period;
- Top videos by views with over 75% retention: A list of videos where at least three-quarters of the content was watched;
- Top videos by annotation/CTA clicks: A list of videos with the highest number of clicks on calls to action and annotation links;
- Video Completion: A bar chart broken down by the number of users who watched 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of a video.
Segments for Proving Video ROI
Reviewing raw numbers in a dashboard is invaluable for tracking video performance over time and refining your video strategy, but that data alone isn't enough to prove return on investment. For businesses (typically B2B) that use the Turnstile feature to capture leads, proving ROI is relatively straightforward: track the number of leads captured, see how many users moved closer to becoming customers, then compare the cost of the video against customer lifetime value.
However, tracking leads in this way isn't particularly practical for the majority of businesses, especially those in service industries and e-commerce. A more actionable way to measure the impact and financial value of on-site videos is to look at how they affect conversions and conversion rates.
Custom Segments
To help you do exactly that, we've built custom segment templates that let you split your web analytics performance between users who engaged with videos and those who didn't. Click the links below to add these two segments to your Google Analytics account.
There are many ways to use these segments to break down performance, but one of the simplest and most effective approaches is to apply both segments to a conversion report and compare the average conversion rate across both groups of users. Here's what you're likely to see, using data from our own Kavimo Google Analytics account (some figures have been removed for privacy reasons):
Based on the chart above, we can see that users who watched videos on the Kavimo website converted at a rate approximately 70% higher than those who didn't. With this information, we can determine that without video content, we would have missed out on 1,486 conversions within the specified time period.
Beyond ROI, this data helps you understand where it makes sense to invest in video content. The report above, for example, shows that the videos on the Kavimo website have had a measurable impact on conversion rates — meaning that investing in more videos is a clear lever for driving that number even higher.
How to Connect Kavimo to Google Analytics
By connecting Google Analytics to your Kavimo panel, you can view detailed video statistics broken down by individual metric. The steps for connecting Kavimo to Google Analytics are outlined below. Before you begin, make sure you have the Google Analytics tracking script installed on your website — this script is required for any kind of custom tracking.
Connecting Kavimo to Google Analytics
Log in to your panel and enter your Google Analytics tracking ID by following the instructions below.
Viewing Stats in the Google Analytics Dashboard
The first step is to navigate to the event tracking section. Open the Behavior section in the left navigation menu and click Events from the list. This section shows the total number of events, the average events per session, and the top events. The easiest way to get a quick overview is to go to Top Events, as shown below:
Depending on how many events you have, there may be quite a lot to see here. By default, we categorize all events under the "video" label.
This section displays a full list of all events. There are several default events — such as videos played, 25% watched, 50% watched, 75% watched, 100% watched, and conversion rate — and your own custom events can be added to this list as well.
For example, let's look at the play event. When you open this event, it shows a list of all videos that were played. The same applies to other events — clicking "25% watched," for instance, will show you a list of videos that were watched at least a quarter of the way through. The integration of Kavimo's analytics with Google Analytics gives users access to all their data in one place: both video analytics and website page view data side by side, providing a more complete picture of how your videos are performing on your site. The screenshots above may not look exactly like yours, as different versions of Google Analytics exist and minor visual differences between versions are to be expected.